Valerie Coleman will be the 2024/25 Sandbox composer-in-residence of Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra

Valerie Coleman will begin her Sandbox Composer Residency in the 2024/25 season.

For Immediate Release

Saint Paul, MN (February 28, 2023) — In its continued commitment to fostering a supportive and collaborative environment for composers and new music, The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra (SPCO) is pleased to announce its newest Sandbox composer-in-residence, Valerie Coleman, who will begin her residency in the 2024/25 season. Coleman will join a roster of renowned composers including Viet Cuong, Clarice Assad and Gabriela Lena Frank. As a composer, entrepreneur and GRAMMY®-nominated flutist, Coleman is widely regarded as an iconic artist who continues to pave her own unique path, garnering awards such as the MAPFund, ASCAP Honors Award, Chamber Music America’s Classical Commissioning Program, Herb Alpert Ragdale Residency Award, and nominations from The American Academy of Arts and Letters and United States Artists.

“A collaboration with SPCO is more than a concert or commission,” said Coleman. “It is an invitation into their world, through music, ideas, memories and new inside jokes that build a lasting connection. This residency for me represents being welcomed into a family in which we create and laugh together, building an exciting chapter within SPCO's legacy."

“I'm so excited to be meeting in person and working with Valerie Coleman!” said SPCO Principal Flute Julia Bogorad-Kogan. “As a fellow (and wonderful) flutist, she is not only my Facebook friend, but I have already performed a number of her works, including a piece for solo flute, one for flute and piano, and a couple of wind quintets. Her writing is always ebullient, exciting, and evocative of a variety of styles and cultures. Of course, being a flutist, she really knows how to write virtuosic riffs for the flute which sound brilliant but nevertheless lie really well on the instrument! Flute players are always on the lookout for well-written pieces which are accessible to the audience and sound great on the flute — so I was not surprised that, as I was preparing her piece for solo flute, Danza de la Mariposa, I found several dozen different performances of it on YouTube! What a gift that she will be with us!”

“We are thrilled to announce Valerie Coleman as the newest Sandbox composer for the SPCO,” said SPCO Artistic Director and Principal Violin Kyu-Young Kim. “Valerie is one of the most important American composers working today, and her background as a world-class flutist and chamber musician makes her an ideal collaborator for the SPCO musicians. The chance to bring Valerie to Saint Paul multiple times and work with her so closely on a piece written specifically for our players and our community is a dream come true. This announcement gives us incredible momentum as we build upon the successful launch of our Sandbox Composer residency with Viet Cuong in 2022 and the exciting plans for Clarice Assad and Gabriela Lena Frank in 2023 and 2024.”

Since its inception with the launch of the orchestra’s 2022/23 season, the Sandbox Composer Residency program has continued to develop, with composers working alongside SPCO musicians to write and workshop new music in a highly collaborative setting inspired by Franz Joseph Haydn’s experience serving the Austrian noble Esterházy family as Kapellmeister, or music director. Haydn famously said about the circumstances of his role: “As head of an orchestra I could try things out, observe what creates a [good] effect and what weakens it, and thus revise, make additions or cuts, take risks. I was cut off from the world, nobody in my vicinity could upset my self-confidence…so I had no choice but to become original.” The Esterházy court orchestra, therefore, was the “sandbox” that inspired nearly thirty years of compositions. Now, some 250 years later, the SPCO Sandbox Residencies, as inspired by Haydn’s own Esterházy residency, afford a diverse group of composers the opportunity to unleash their creativity and bring forth a body of exciting new music.

In the fall of 2022, Viet Cuong premiered two new works (Doubling Back, which was an expanded version of his original SPCO commission Circling Back for Oboe and Cello, and Now and Then) in two weekends of concerts at the Ordway and in Neighborhood Series venues, marking a successful launch of the Sandbox Composer Residency program before finishing his tenure in November 2022. Since Cuong’s departure, Sandbox composer Clarice Assad, has begun her tenure with frequent visits to work with SPCO musicians in preparation for concerts on March 4, where she will be featured as both composer and performer in her composition É Gol! In addition to her work leading up to March, Assad will premiere a new work composed during her Sandbox residency in January 2024, with orchestral workshops occurring in both June and September 2023. Coleman will be joined by fellow Sandbox composer-in-residence Gabriela Lena Frank in the 2024.25 season, with Frank’s workshops beginning in 2024 in preparation of a premiere in January 2025.

The SPCO has performed chamber works by Coleman in recent seasons, and recordings of the performances are available in the free, digital Concert Library.

About the Sandbox Composer Residency Program

The 2022/23 season brought the launch of the SPCO’s Sandbox Composer Residency program — a new initiative for engaging composers and community in the creation of new music. Over the next several seasons, three composers will participate in innovative and intensive multi-week residencies with the SPCO, in a program designed to foster a spirit of shared discovery and the creation of a significant body of new music. Viet Cuong, Clarice Assad and Gabriela Lena Frank have been selected to work with SPCO musicians as the inaugural Sandbox composers, and Valerie Coleman will join the roster of Sandbox composers in the 2024.25 season.

In a divergence from the industry standard of commissioning individual works, the Sandbox Composer Residencies will provide support for composers to experiment freely across a variety of new works created in collaboration with the musicians of the SPCO. This alternative residency model will focus on building lasting relationships between the SPCO and resident composers by allowing composers to workshop new pieces, experiment and revise, take risks, develop relationships with SPCO musicians and engage with SPCO audiences.

The guiding principle of Sandbox is to grant composers the creative license to write and rehearse new music in a collaborative setting. The central belief behind Sandbox is that when composers are given this creative license to share compositions with audiences through workshops, post-concert sessions and, ultimately, subscription concerts, the resulting spirit of play, creativity and discovery can lead to a paradigm shift for orchestral music and ground the art form in the present rather than the past.

Sandbox composers will write at least one work for the full SPCO ensemble. Through various Sandbox Sessions and workshops, resident composers will engage performers and audiences in the compositional process. Postconcert talk-backs from the stage will allow the composer and performers to share music and context with the audience in a more informal setting. In lieu of the standard commission-based model by which an orchestra hires a composer to write one piece of music for a specific performance, the Sandbox model will allow for the orchestra and the composer to be more flexible, working with and inspired by each other to create a body of music reflective of our times while allowing for deeper, long-lasting connections between audience, performers and composers in a shared experience of collaborative music-making.