Carnegie Hall Commissions - About the Composer: Laura Karpman

A distinguished and versatile artist whose career spans the worlds of concert, theater, film, television, and music for video games, Laura Karpman’s works have been commissioned by percussionist Evelyn Glennie, the Los Angeles Opera, Tonya Pinkins, the American Composers Orchestra, the Czech Philharmonic, and the Juilliard Choral Union, among others. Her works have been performed by orchestras and ensembles worldwide, including the Los Angeles Philharmonic; the Detroit, Richmond, Seattle, Tucson, New York Youth, and Prague symphonies; the San Jose Chamber Symphony; and the Juilliard Chorus. Her theater catalog includes musicals for Los Angeles’s A Noise Within theater company and underscore-music for dozens of classic plays. Other music credits include Steven Spielberg’s Emmy Award–winning miniseries Taken; PBS’s acclaimed series The Living Edens, for which she received four Emmy Awards; and numerous films, television programs, and video games, including music for Halo III and the award-winning score for Everquest II.

Ms. Karpman’s groundbreaking score for Ask Your Mama!, featuring Jessye Norman, The Roots, and George Manahan conducting the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, premiered at Carnegie Hall on March 16, 2009, and will also be performed at the Hollywood Bowl on August 30 and the Baltimore Symphony February 4-6, 2010. Upcoming projects include the 110 Project, a newly commissioned work from the Los Angeles Opera in recognition of the city’s first freeway.

Ms. Karpman has received an Ives Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and several ASCAP Foundation and Meet the Composer grants; in addition, she has been an artist-in-residence at Tanglewood, where she studied with John Harbison, and at the MacDowell Colony. She was among the first composers selected as a Sundance Institute Film Scoring Fellow, where she worked with Dave Grusin; she also attended the Aspen Music School and L’Ecole des Arts Américains, where she worked with Nadia Boulanger. She received her bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan, and her master&rsqo;s and doctoral degrees from The Juilliard School, where she studied with Milton Babbitt. She is currently on the faculty of the UCLA School of Film and Television, and was recently a guest composer at The Juilliard School’s Composition Forum.