WPA News Digest – August 25, 2025

August is drawing to a close, and with it the summer hiatuses of most regularly-performing orchestras! While we at WPA eagerly await their return—hopefully with programs brimming with music by fabulous women composers—here’s a preview of a few exciting evens of the 2025/2026 season.

But first, an interesting event combining music with health & wellness. On Monday September 1st (Labor Day) the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra will be hosting an event called Music + the Body on the Eli and Edythe Broad Stage at the Performing Arts Center of Santa Monica College in partnership with the National MS Society. Designed as an event for the whole family, the event will begin at 11AM local time with an assortment of activities, including: learning about and making your own instruments, composing music, and experiencing music and dance together. A panel of healthcare professionals will be presenting materials to raise awareness about MS (multiple sclerosis), and the event will conclude with a concert at 2pm. The concert will feature various pieces by composer Jeff Beal (who has MS) —New York Ètudes, Body in Motion for Violin and Orchestra, and the world premiere of Four Score for the LACO—with violin soloist Kelly Hall-Tompkins.

The Toulmin Foundation 2025 Fellows are preparing for premieres of their upcoming commissions this season! The League of American Orchestras’ Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation Orchestral Commissions Program— partnered with the American Composers Orchestra—supports a commissioning initiative for new orchestral works across the United States, connecting composers with orchestras (or collaborating groups of orchestras) to create new works and a nationwide initiative to support repeat performances of works by contemporary American composers. Now over ten years old, the program promotes orchestral works by women and nonbinary composers—large-scale works that are expensive to create and rehearse, and that are therefore more difficult for contemporary composers to have performed. The Orchestral Commissions Program aims to increase the gender diversity of American orchestras’ repertoire—and, through leading by example, the repertoire of orchestras the world over—and thus to improve the vitality of our art form.

The third consortium of the Toulmin Foundation Commissions Program was announced earlier this year, and features three new commissions by composers Stacy Garrop, Angel Lam, and Leanna Primiani. These commissions are for full-length concert works for orchestra of roughly 25- to 30-minutes. These three world premieres plus repeat performances of the new works by a consortium of nine orchestras will occur during the 2025-26 and 2026-27 seasons. The world premiere of Stacy Garrop‘s new work, CHROMA, will be given by the Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra on March 21, 2026, followed by the Johnstown [Pennsylvania] Symphony Orchestra and the Lexington [Kentucky] Philharmonic; the world premiere of Angel Lam‘s new work (title to be announced) will be given by the Quad City Symphony Orchestra [Iowa] on February 7, 2026, followed by the Columbus [Ohio] Symphony and the Johns Creek [Georgia] Symphony Orchestra; the world premiere of Leanna Primiani‘s work Visions: Concerto for Orchestra will be given by ROCO [Houston, TX] at a date TBD, followed by the Symphony of the Rockies [Colorado] and the Wheeling [West Virginia] Symphony Orchestra.

Dr. Stacy Garrop is an internationally-recognized composer and lecturer whose music centers dramatic and lyrical storytelling. After sixteen years of teaching composition and orchestration at Northwestern University, she left the academy to continue as a full-time freelance composer. Her catalog includes music in many genres, including works for orchestra, opera, oratorio, wind ensemble, choir, art song, and chamber ensembles. In addition to being a Toulmin Fellow, Dr. Garrop has received numerous awards and grants including an Arts and Letters Award in Music from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Fromm Music Foundation Grant, Barlow Prize, and three Barlow Endowment commissions. Some of her notable commissions for orchestra include: Forging Steel for the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, The Battle for the Ballot for the Cabrillo Festival Orchestra, Goddess Triptych for the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, and Berko’s Journey for the Omaha Symphony, Her new work CHROMA has already been described as “living up to its name—exploring a dazzling spectrum of musical hues in a piece that is both inventive and deeply resonant.”

Below is a performance of Dr. Garrop’s Krakatoa Concerto for Viola and Orchestra, performed by the Champaign-Urbana Symphony Orchestra in 2019 at the Krannery Center for the Performing Arts.

 

Dr. Angel Lam is a Grammy-nominated composer who “uses the beauty of melodies, songs, instrumentation, and the written language to express detailed emotions and her passion for life.” Major themes in her work include stories about musical life and death, human relationships, and memories. She has training in both western classical and Chinese folk music, and played the Zheng and Qin as a young girl. Her works for orchestra have been performed by ensembles across the United States, including: the Atlanta Symphony, Minnesota Orchestra, Colorado Symphony, Kansas City Symphony, Utah Symphony, Jacksonville Symphony, Quad City Symphony, New York Greenwich Village Orchestra, Yale Philharmonia, Chicago Northwest Symphony, Hong Kong Sinfonietta, University of California Irvine Symphony, and the Aspen Music Festival Orchestra.

Below is a recording of Angel Lam’s In Search of Seasons for orchestra, performed by the Yale Philharmonia in 2022 with opening narration by the composer.

 

Composer and Arturia Artist Leanna Primiani‘s music combines electronic modernism and orchestral abstraction across classical, film, and ambient electronic genres  (in case her match-made-in-heaven collaboration with ROCO wasn’t already clear.) Her musical expression shows her existence as a composer at the nexus of concert and Hollywood traditions, constantly moving between them. “What matters most to Leanna is to use her musical voice to advocate for social change, writing works that focus on the issues that matter to her most: human trafficking, gender equality, and juvenile justice.” Her orchestral music has been performed at Carnegie Hall, and by the Omaha Symphony, Rochester Philharmonic, Nashville Symphony, ROCO, American Composers Orchestra, Wheeling Symphony, Kalamazoo Symphony, and the Seattle Collaborative Orchestra.

Below is a recording of Primiani’s Neither men nor money validate my worth, which is a previous Toulmin Commission, written to honor victims of human trafficking. This performance is from 2024 by ROCO, the same ensemble that will premiere her new work in 2026. (Primiani’s piece begins at 36:41)

 

The Toulmin Foundation’s additional repeat performances initiative will support presentations of previously commissioned works by the sixteen composers from the original 2014-2019 cohort of program participants. These repeat performances will occur throughout the 2025-26 and 2026-27 seasons, will feature a new roster of 16 participating orchestras, and can be viewed on the foundation’s website.

Let us know what you’re listening to! Email us at info@wophil.org