Interview with Missy Mazzoli

Interview: Ivana Rajič

Missy Mazzoli—one of the most prominent American composers of her generation—does not speak about music in terms of categories or stylistic boxes. In conversation, Johann Sebastian Bach stands alongside the feminist punk movement Riot Grrrl, opera alongside Netflix, and medieval healing rituals alongside today’s political unrest. Again and again, she returns to a central idea: music as a way of making sense of the world—emotionally, politically, and personally.

This openness also defines her upcoming season as NDR’s »Artist Across Ensembles«, with performances of her work at the Elbphilharmonie as part of a broader focus on America. It is also about reaching a diverse audience and addressing the question of music’s relevance in a present shaped by profound political, social, and media shifts. In both her work and her artistic outlook, Missy Mazzoli embodies precisely this openness and engagement with the present.

Die musikalische Welt der einzigartigen Komponistin in sechs Konzerten kennenlernen

Missy Mazzoli, your music often moves between the familiar and the unfamiliar. Do you consciously shape that interplay when you write?

Missy Mazzoli: Yes, absolutely. I’m always trying to draw listeners in with something familiar—maybe it’s a chord progression, a melody, a texture that reminds them of another style or another era of music. But then I want to balance that with moments that feel surprising or destabilizing. I think the most interesting part of a piece happens exactly where the familiar and unfamiliar meet. That’s what keeps us listening.

I also think nostalgia and playing on people’s associations can be a very powerful musical tool. You can make someone feel they know where something is going—and then suddenly take them somewhere completely different.

We hear that idea very clearly in »Sinfonia (for Orbiting Spheres)« for Orchestra, which marks the beginning of her tenure as NDR’s »Artist Across Ensembles« in the 2026/27 season. Even the title already plays with expectations and musical memory.

Exactly. »Sinfonia« is a word that immediately sounds familiar to people—they might know it or have heard it before. But then »for Orbiting Spheres« pushes it somewhere they have never experienced before, like my own twist on this baroque idiom.

The piece itself is structured like a solar system. There are these looping layers of material moving at different speeds and returning at different times, like planets orbiting around the sun. So there are loops within loops within loops. And within that structure there are also references to older music—Baroque ornamentation at the beginning, a chorale-like moment near the end. I’m always interested in taking gestures that feel familiar and placing them into a completely different emotional or sonic environment.

The concerts overall bring together works from different periods of your career. What connected them for you when selecting the pieces?

Part of it was simply shaped by instrumentation and logistics. But I also wanted to bring over works that haven’t been widely heard in Germany yet. So there’s »Orpheus Undone« this fall, alongside a major collaboration with Third Coast Percussion and choir in spring. I’m arranging several existing works for those forces as well, which is very exciting.

In general, your music draws on very different musical worlds—from Baroque and Romantic references to electronics and indie rock—yet it never feels stylistically fragmented. When you compose, are you consciously thinking about bringing those different traditions together?

I really love connecting music from different periods and contexts—whether that’s Riot Grrrl music from the 1990s or Baroque music from the 1600s. I tend to think of my work as part of a continuum rather than as separate categories. Sometimes I hear Bach, for example, and it almost feels like punk rock — very direct, emotional, raw. For me, it’s about finding the emotional threads that connect very different kinds of music across different eras. In the end, I think I’m creating something that isn’t tied to any one period but draws freely from all of them.

What music were you first drawn to when you were a child?

I loved classical music from the beginning—I found it completely transporting. My family wasn’t musical, but we had a couple of classical CDs at home that I played constantly. I started piano around age seven, when my parents bought one at a flea market, and I began making things up on it before I could even read music. Once I started lessons, I became very quickly obsessed with it. It was my way of understanding the world. I began composing around ten—very simple piano pieces, like little stories in sound, animals in the forest, or imitations of Beethoven and Mozart. It was really just about creating these small musical worlds.

You then started playing in punk bands as a teenager—quite a shift in musical direction.

I just loved making music with other people, but as a piano player I couldn’t really take part in an orchestra. I then started playing guitar and bass, and there was a very vibrant punk and hardcore scene around Philadelphia in the 1990s, which led me to the Riot Grrrl movement. I saw bands made up entirely of young women expressing themselves in this loud, direct, unapologetic way.

People like Kathleen Hanna and Kim Gordon were my idols. And it wasn’t only about the music—through them, my politics really started to form. They spoke openly about abortion rights, freedom of speech, feminism—issues I hadn’t really heard discussed in that way before. It was the first time I experienced politics expressed creatively in a way that really resonated with me.

That sense of artistic self-determination seems to run through your entire career.

Definitely. When I went to college, I lived in a large house with journalism students who were publishing an independent newspaper called »The Student Underground« at Boston University. It was the years after 9/11, a very charged political moment in the US—and the first time I had experienced something on that scale. I was the only musician in the house, which I actually loved. Everyone was constantly talking about politics, books, philosophy, and current events. I’m often more inspired by non-musical things than by music itself. Being around people who were creating their own newspaper, organizing protests, and speaking out about what they cared about had a huge influence on me. It really instilled this idea that you can create things yourself from the ground up.

When you then moved to New York City, you found yourself in a very connected, DIY-oriented new music community. Did that environment reinforce your drive to take things into your own hands—leading to the formation of your band Victoire?

Absolutely. The year after I moved to New York, in 2007, I formed Victoire, and it really grew out of that environment. We all knew each other through the Bang on a Can community—the Bang on a Can Collective was a central hub for new music in New York at the time. They had a summer festival, concerts, rehearsals—it was a place where a lot of people in that scene were constantly coming together. But the idea also goes further back. There was already a lineage we were very aware of—the Philip Glass Ensemble, Steve Reich’s group, Meredith Monk’s vocal ensemble. Those were important models for us.

Was it a conscious decision to form an all-female group?

Yes, it definitely was. At the time I was looking around at my musical circles and the people I was making music with, and they were mostly men. Composition is still very much numerically dominated by male composers. I really wanted the experience of making music with other women, and I was also still influenced by my experience in the riot grrrl scene. And there was also a very practical side to it: I was thinking about who I wanted to be stuck in a van with, driving around the country to play shows, and who I felt I could talk to and share creative ideas with. Those five women were the people I could imagine doing that with.

Was that same impulse also behind founding Luna Composition Lab—a mentorship program for young female and nonbinary composers?

Absolutely. When I started it with Ellen Reid in 2016, the numbers were still really striking: only around two-and-a-half percent of works performed by major orchestras were written by women, and only about seven percent of new commissions went to women.

We started to look more closely at where the system breaks down—why so many young female and non-binary composers end up leaving the field. Two things stood out: a lack of role models, meaning very few women teaching at universities, getting major performances, or being widely celebrated; and a key turning point around the age of eighteen or nineteen, when people decide whether they can realistically imagine a professional life in music. The idea was to build mentorship, visibility, and community. It’s incredibly powerful to see someone who looks like you succeeding. If you only see »white men« being celebrated, it can easily feel like that path isn’t meant for you.

Do you feel the field is now genuinely changing?

Yes—when it comes to female composers and repertoire being performed at major institutions and by big orchestras, absolutely. The share of works by women programmed by major orchestras is now around seven percent on average, which is a big jump from about two-and-a-half percent ten years ago. And around twenty percent of new commissions now go to women.

But it’s still not enough. Women make up roughly fifty percent of the population, so if they’re not receiving anywhere near fifty percent of commissions, something in the system of how music is promoted and produced is still not working. That said, there have been real leaps over the past decade, and also more openness—women are able to speak about these issues with much less fear of backlash than before.

This imbalance becomes especially visible in long-established institutions. A prominent example is the Metropolitan Opera: in 2018, together with Jeanine Tesori, you became one of the first two women to receive a composition commission from the Metropolitan Opera. What did this moment mean to you personally and artistically?

I’m really honored, because it was my childhood dream to write an opera for the Met—not something I really allowed myself to imagine, because it felt so far away.

It was a very particular moment, because in 2018 Janine Tesori and I were commissioned at the same time, becoming the first two women ever commissioned by the Met. Since then, they’ve gone on to program more works by women—including Gabriela Lena Frank’s opera about Frida Kahlo and Kaija Saariaho’s »Innocence«. There is real movement there. Of course, it would be very sad if I were the last woman ever commissioned. But if I can be among the first and help inspire young women and non-binary composers to see opera as a viable field, that feels meaningful. At the same time, it’s striking that it took 165 years for a woman to be commissioned there—so there’s both progress and a reminder of how long it took to get here.

Finally, you once said that when you started writing opera, you felt you had finally arrived where you were supposed to be as a composer. In light of everything we’ve been talking about—representation, politics, and your commission at the Met—what is it about opera that feels so compelling to you right now?

I think I’ve always been trying to tell stories with my music, even in purely instrumental works. I think of music as a narrative form, a way of understanding and processing the world—its ups and downs, its betrayals, joys, and big emotions. Opera obviously embraces that, so when I started writing it, it really felt like: this is what I’ve been building towards my whole life. There’s also the collaborative aspect—working with many people and different mediums at the same time—and the layering, where different elements can be telling different things simultaneously. Because when we feel things, it’s rarely just one thing; it’s always a mix of emotions, and opera can really reflect that.

I’ve also always been very interested in politics and current events, and I want my work to be part of that broader conversation, not just a musical one. Opera allows me to engage with the world more directly—whether that’s the opioid crisis, cult psychology, or, in »Lincoln in the Bardo,« a divided America and Abraham Lincoln’s grief during the Civil War. People have compared my opera »The Listeners« to a Netflix series, and I love that. That’s how people experience stories now—through streaming, serialized formats, the news cycle. Opera already has that immediacy and intensity, and I think it belongs in that same storytelling landscape.