Caroline Mallonee has had a long time to think about how to address the question, “What inspires you to compose?” That’s because Mallonee — one of 19 prominent women composers tapped by the New York Philharmonic to create new works for its groundbreaking Project 19 commissioning initiative — has been at it since she was nine years old.
Growing up in Baltimore, she started piano lessons at age five. On entering first grade she informed her family that she needed to play violin. While taking lessons at Peabody Preparatory and, during summers, at The Walden School in Dublin, New Hampshire, she was immersed in the innovative musicianship curriculum designed by the celebrated pedagogue Grace Cushman.
“It’s kind of like music theory, but based much more on fluency and creativity within the tools that you learn,” Mallonee explains. “Everyone has to write music from the very beginning.” She recalls her first attempt, a little piece in Mixolydian mode. “I just sort of ran with that, and I’ve been writing music ever since.” Her formal composition teachers have included Bernard Rands and Mario Davidovsky at Harvard, Joseph Schwantner and Evan Ziporyn at Yale, Louis Andriessen at the Royal Conservatory of the Hague, and Scott Lindroth and Stephen Jaffe at Duke University. That imposing pantheon represents a broad range of idioms and styles, which allowed Mallonee to develop a personal voice without subscribing to any particular dogma.
Like many composers of her generation, Mallonee has also kept busy as a performer. As a high schooler she formed an a cappella vocal group, and went on to co-found the Harvard-Radcliffe Contemporary Music Ensemble; pulsoptional, a composer-performer collective in Durham, North Carolina; and Glissando Bin Laden, a daredevil improvising group praised by The New York Times. Based in Buffalo since 2010, she now sings professionally in Vocális Chamber Choir and Harmonia Chamber Singers.
Returning to the question about what sparks her creativity, the answer that appears on her website is “scientific phenomena, visual art, and musical puzzles.” Unless Acted Upon: Manifestations of Newton’s First Law — a chamber work included in a 2015 concert on the New York Philharmonic CONTACT! new-music series — replicates a principle of Newtonian physics in sound. “The idea of musical process is a through-line in my work,” Mallonee explains. “In that one, it was: What process, applied to what kind of music, is going to make this audible to the audience?”
In addition to two other works based on Newton’s Laws of Motion, her science-based oeuvre includes Whistler Waves, a cello concerto meant to evoke an atmospheric phenomenon, and The Butterfly Effect, a widely played string quartet inspired by the idea that small events can have big effects on complex systems.
Asked to name a piece inspired by visual art, Mallonee points to Wavefield, a duet for viola and cello in which oscillating patterns, dynamics, and even bowings emulate the undulations of a Maya Lin sculpture. As for a puzzle, she proudly cites Alaskan King, a cello duet in the form of a rigorous crab canon: starting halfway through, each cellist plays the other’s prior part backward.
Aspects of all three creative strands intertwine in Lakeside Game, the piece Mallonee composed for her Project 19 commission that the New York Philharmonic is premiering this month (November 13–16). The new piece artfully evokes a scene from childhood: walks along the Lake Michigan shore. There’s a hint of science in rhythms that emulate stones skipped across the lake’s surface, and a puzzle in the way the second half of the piece revisits the first half “sort of upside down and sort of backwards,” Mallonee says.
It’s a big, bold summary of how Mallonee got to this moment, and, she hopes, the start of an even bigger musical community that will provide fresh inspiration.
About Project 19
In February 2020 the New York Philharmonic premiered the first works born of Project 19. The Orchestra’s multi-season initiative to commission and premiere 19 new works by 19 women composers — the largest women-only commissioning initiative in history — marks the centennial of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, which established American women’s right to vote. The project’s objective was to celebrate women composers and catalyze representation in classical music and beyond.
This month’s premiere of Caroline Mallonee’s Lakeside Game follows the unveiling of works by Mary Kouyoumdjian, Joan La Barbara, Nicole Lizée, Tania León (whose Stride received the Pulitzer Prize for Music), Jessie Montgomery, Angélica Negrón, Olga Neuwirth, Paola Prestini, Ellen Reid, Caroline Shaw, Sarah Kirkland Snider, Anna Thorvaldsdottir, Joan Tower, Melinda Wagner, and Nina C. Young.
