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 125 works are ten cantatas including one for The Philadelphia Orchestra. Dr. Clearfield is a recipient of the 2014 Copland House Residency Award and has held fellowships at the American Academy in Rome, the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, The MacDowell Colony, Ucross and Yaddo among others. She is the founder and host of the renowned Philadelphia Salon concerts featuring contemporary, classical, jazz, electronic, dance, and world music since 1986 and winner of Philadelphia Magazine’s 2008 “Best of Philadelphia” award. Dr. Clearfield is currently writing an opera on the life of the Tibetan yogi, Milarepa, to libretto by Jean-Claude van Itallie and Lois Walden commissioned by Gene Kaufman and Terry Eder for NYC premiere with development assistance from American Lyric Theater.
