In 2023 composer Chelsea Komschlies was one of six female and non-binary composers selected to join the League of American Orchestra’s Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation Orchestral Commissions Program. The program brings together a national consortium of 30 orchestras to partner with the composers with six lead orchestras (including the TSO) each premiering a new work by one of the chosen composers. The consortium ensures the new works will receive multiple performances throughout the country. Komschlies’ piece ‘Mycelialore’ will have its world premiere with the TSO on the Mahler and Schumann Masterworks program on February 1 and 2, 2025.
As a teenager, Chelsea Komschlies fell in love with the drama of big, sweeping cinematic fantasy film scores, particularly the work Howard Shore and John Williams. It was Shore’s Academy and Grammy award winning score for The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring that ignited the young Komschlies’ passion for composition. Now a Ph.D. candidate in composition under Jean Lesage at McGill University, Komschlies feels that she is “coming into my authentic style and it’s kept some of that film score drama, even as my harmonic and timbral language is more complex and more experimental.” Each of Komschlies’ compositions, including Mycelialore creates “a distinct fantasy world and, evokes vivid multisensory imagery and a range of psycho-emotional landscapes, from whimsical nostalgia and camp to eerie disquiet, and from altered states of consciousness to glittering spiritual awe.”
In Mycelialore Komschlies melds her interests in the human brain and fungi to create a fantasy world of mushrooms. Mycelium is the underground root-like structure of fungus. “The mycelium can form networks between trees and other plants, and there are many ways in which these networks can function like a human brain, like neurons firing. As a composer and fantasy enthusiast, I took that idea based in real science into a fantasy realm and asked the question: if these mycelium networks kind of function like a brain, then what if they had their own folklore and their own memory? If mushrooms can remember and tell their own stories, what would they say and how would they sound?”
To create the sound of her mushroom fantasy world, Komschlies took inspiration from her own cultural background in the form of Celtic folk music as well as her more recently discovered love of 70s progressive rock. “Mixing those two together, plus more experimental writing, and then adding the idea of what would a mushroom sound like? What would its music sound like? There is a fun and mind-bending element to it. But at the same time, there’s also a darkness embedded in the piece, because the mushrooms have been around for longer than us and I imagine them telling stories about the way things used to be before humanity altered the world.”
This will be the second time Komschlies has partnered with the TSO. In May of 2022, the TSO premiered Komschlies’ A Hidden Sun Rises as part of EarShot, a program led by the American Composers Orchestra with a goal of developing relationships between composers and orchestras on the national level to ensure a vibrant musical future by investing in creativity today. A Hidden Sun Rises was also included on the Zhang Plays Mendelssohn Masterworks program in early January 2024. “I think it will make the rehearsal process and the premiering process feel safe and comfortable because I’ve already had such a positive experience working with Maestro Gomez and the TSO in the past, Maestro Gomez is such an advocate for living composers and it shows in his process. Having the premiere with the TSO will make the collaborations with the four other orchestras subsequently performing the piece feel more seamless. This prior relationship with Tucson, this ongoing relationship, it’s really special to me.”
Learn more about the Mahler and Schumann program and purchase tickets.