Andrea Clearfield is an award-winning full time composer of music for orchestra, chorus, chamber ensemble, dance, and multimedia collaborations. She has been praised by the New York Times for her “graceful tracery and lively, rhythmically vital writing”, the Philadelphia Inquirer for her “compositional wizardry” and “mastery with large choral and instrumental forces”, the L.A. Times for her “fluid and glistening orchestration” and by Opera News for her “vivid and galvanizing” music of “timeless beauty”.
Her works are performed widely in the U.S. and abroad. Among her 160 works are thirteen large-scale cantatas including one for the Philadelphia Orchestra. Recent works are inspired by Tibetan music fieldwork that she conducted in the Nepalese Himalaya. She was appointed the Steven R. Gerber Composer in Residence with the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia for their 2018-19 season and is currently the 2020-2023 Composer-in-residence with National Concerts at Carnegie Hall. Her opera, MILA, Great Sorcerer, with librettists Jean-Claude van Itallie and Lois Walden, was presented at the NYC Prototype Festival in 2019. Dr. Clearfield was awarded a 2021 Pew International Residency Award, a 2016 Pew Fellowship in the Arts, two Independence Foundation Fellowship awards and fellowships at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, American Academy in Rome, Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony among others. She is in demand as a curator, speaker, music panelist and adjudicator. She received a DMA from Temple University where she was awarded the prestigious Presidential Fellowship and was honored as a distinguished alumna, an MM from the University of the Arts and a BA from Muhlenberg College where she received the Alumni Achievement in the Arts Award. She is the founder, curator and host of the renowned Philadelphia Salon concert series (now online as the ZALON) featuring contemporary, classical, jazz, electronic, dance, and world music since 1986 and winner of Philadelphia Magazine’s 2008 “Best of Philadelphia” award. More at www.andreaclearfield.com.
