drought sculptures
FACULTY CATEGORY

Ella Kaale (b. 2003) is a Los Angeles-based composer whose work uses collage, deconstruction, and extreme contrasts in its search for immersion and catharsis. She loves to tinker with acoustic sound colors and is never afraid to make an instrument buzz differently than it was intended. Ella is frequently inspired by the natural world and how humans interact with it, particularly in deserts and oceans.

Her music has been performed by Cabrillo Festival Orchestra, UCLA Philharmonia, USC Thornton Symphony, Inner City Youth Orchestra of Los Angeles, The Living Earth Show, Norfolk Contemporary Ensemble, TAK Ensemble, CORVUS, Hub New Music, Pacific Chamber Orchestra, Bent Frequency, Black House New Music, Bergamot Quartet, Perpetuum Duo, and Schroeder Umansky Duo. Kaale is an alumna of the NYO-USA’s Composer Apprenticeship, Hear Now Music Festival, Composing in the Wilderness, New Music on the Point, Norfolk New Music Workshop, and Hidden Valley Music Seminars. Her career highlights include a performance at Walt Disney Concert Hall and a feature on Score Follower.

Kaale was named a 2025 Outstanding Graduate and Presser Scholar in the B.M. Composition program at the University of Southern California Thornton School of Music, where her pedagogues included Christopher Trapani, Ted Hearne, Andrew Norman, and Donald Crockett. Her senior capstone The Allegory of Everywhere was awarded the Sadye J. Moss Endowed Musical Composition Prize. She is continuing her studies at USC with a fully-funded M.M. as an Aural Skill Teaching Assistant, and is a Teaching Artist with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra. When not composing, Ella can be found playing cello in her friends’ projects, watching Jeopardy!, or spending time with Laika, her corgi.

Superhuman
MULTIMEDIA CATEGORY

Charles Peck is a composer whose work has been called “daring” (Philadelphia Inquirer), “wild and shimmering” (Broad Street Review), and “substantial, personal, genuine” (Roger Shapiro Fund for New Music). His music, spanning a range of chamber and large ensembles, has been performed by the Minnesota Orchestra, the Albany and Columbus Symphonies, the Kaleidoscope Chamber Orchestra, the Civic Orchestra of Chicago, the JACK Quartet, Sandbox Percussion, and Contemporaneous. Recently awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Peck has also received commissions from the Fromm Music Foundation, the Barlow Endowment, the McKnight Foundation, the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, Alarm Will Sound, the Bergamot Quartet, and Ji Hye Jung and has been named a winner of composition competitions with the New York Youth Symphony, ASCAP, the Lake George Music Festival, Frame Dance, the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, Symphony in C, the Tribeca New Music Festival, the Boston New Music Initiative, and the Foundation for Modern Music, among others. His music has been featured at a variety of venues and festivals, including Carnegie Hall, Chicago’s Symphony Center, the Aspen Music Festival, the Cabrillo Festival, the Mizzou International Composers Festival, the Minnesota Orchestra’s Composer Institute, the Beijing Modern Music Festival, Cultivate at Copland House, and the New Music Gathering. Peck is a member of the composition faculty at the University of Pittsburgh.

excentric kinetics

MULTIMEDIA CATEGORY
visit Ty’s website

SLUG!

MULTIMEDIA CATEGORY
visit Coral’s website

Odd Behavior

FACULTY CATEGORY
visit Carrie’s website

Inquiline

MULTIMEDIA CATEGORY
visit Uri’s website

contours snared, in warp and weft

MULTIMEDIA CATEGORY
visit Rob’s website

interlocutor for piano quartet

FACULTY CATEGORY
visit Paul’s website

Poems from Angel Island

FACULTY CATEGORY
visit Ethan’s website

Three Chants for Assembling an Oboe

FACULTY CATEGORY
visit Anibal’s website