Berklee Composition Department

Grateful to hear these compositions leap off the page in a reading session with . Huge thanks to these incredible musicians for diving into works by Berklee composers and giving them voice, energy, and color.

There’s nothing like the moment when ideas turn into sound. 🥁

All Composition majors and Conducting minors are invited to our 2025-26 End-of-Year Celebration on Monday, May 4 from 4:00pm-5:00pm in the Fishbowl. Take a break from finals and celebrate the end of the academic year with your peers! Refreshments will be provided 🧃🎶🎉

Head to 31 Hemenway Street on Sunday May 3rd, to see the Spring 2026 Composing New Music & Dance Concert! 💃🎶🎻🥁

Tomorrow Sound Icon will read student pieces this Friday from 11:00am-4:00pm! Students will participate in the following order: Rozhina Rajabloo, Alireza Khodayari, Ryder Hendry, Emily Johnson, Ophelia Ariadne Worbes, Iris Irwin, Erin Leung, Murong Tang, Christina Masoura. All are welcome to sit-in on the readings!

Tomorrow we’ll have our last seminar of the year! On Wednesday, April 29 at 6pm in 1140/2E, special guest artist Hana Ajiashvili will join us for our last Composition Seminar of the semester.

Hana Ajiashvili was born in Tbilisi, Georgia and received a Master Diploma in piano and composition from the Music Sergiashvili Academy in 1995. Among her prizes are First Prize at the Israel Contemporary Players’ Young Israeli Composer’s Competition 2004, in 2007 her music for the film Miracle received awards in Poland, Belgium and China, in 2008 she received the Prime Minister’s Award for Composers, in 2011 won commission from Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation for the new piece “Zoominout” for the ensemble “The Israel Contemporary Players”. Learn more about Dr. Ajiashvili here: https://www.hamusic.net/

Thank you for a fantastic Directed Study Concert yesterday 🎶

We’re proud to celebrate the work of our student composers whose pieces were brought to life: Devin Connolly (not pictured), Christina Masoura, Ophelia Ariadne Worbes, Benjamin Broady, Manu Mukitineni, Aleksander Nivette, Oliver Brauer, Adrien Jippov, and Enrico Widodo.

Also a great thanks to all of our performers making this concert possible!

Your creativity, dedication, and artistry made for an inspiring evening of new music.

LivePerformance

Join us on April 22 for an evening of new music by our Composition Directed Study students 🎶🎼🎵

Each composer will present a work developed over the course of the semester, brought to life in performance by their collaborators. The concert highlights a wide range of approaches and ideas, offering a glimpse into the individual creative paths of our student composers.

We hope to see you there!

Berklee

We were honored to welcome composer, sound artist, and 2026 Edmundson Visiting Artist Yvette Janine Jackson to Berklee this spring.

During her residency, Yvette led inspiring masterclasses with our composition students, sharing insights into her creative process, storytelling through sound, and innovative approaches to radio opera and electroacoustic music. She also gave a thought-provoking presentation followed by a dynamic Q&A, offering students the chance to engage directly with her work and ideas.

Thank you, Yvette, for your generosity, artistry, and for challenging our students to think deeply about sound, narrative, and the role of the composer today.

Berklee

Tomorrow Wednesday, April 8 at 6:00pm in 1140/2E, Elliott Sharp will perform and present his music in Composition Seminar! 🎶

Sharp is an American multi-instrumentalist, composer, and performer.

A central figure in the avant-garde and experimental music scene in New York City for over 30 years, Elliott Sharp has released over eighty-five recordings ranging from orchestral music to blues, jazz, noise, no wave rock, and techno music. He leads the projects Carbon and Orchestra Carbon, Tectonics, and Terraplane and has pioneered ways of applying fractal geometry, chaos theory, and genetic metaphors to musical composition and interaction.

His collaborators have included Radio-Sinfonie Frankfurt; pop singer Debbie Harry; Ensemble Modern; Qawwali singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan; Kronos String Quartet; Ensemble Resonanz; cello innovator Frances Marie Uitti; blues legends Hubert Sumlin and Pops Staples; p**a virtuoso Min-Xiao Feng; jazz greats Jack deJohnette, Oliver Lake, and Sonny Sharrock; multimedia artists Christian Marclay and Pierre Huyghe; and Bachir Attar, leader of the Master Musicians Of Jajouka.

Sharp is a 2014 Guggenheim Fellow, and a 2014 Fellow at Parson’s Center for Transformative Media. He received the 2015 Berlin Prize in Musical Composition from the American Academy in Berlin. He has composed scores for feature films and documentaries; created sound-design for interstitials on The Sundance Channel, MTV and Bravo networks; and has presented numerous sound installations in art galleries and museums. He is the subject of a new documentary “Doing The Don’t” by filmmaker Bert Shapiro.