Composer Highlight
Chicago composer Stacy Garrop left a tenured university position to compose full time. From the Kronos Quartet to the Pittsburgh Symphony, her music has been heard on stages around the world. Now as Nova Linea Musica's first Composer-in-Residence, she is helping shape the future of contemporary classical music in Chicago.
Publish Date:
March 8, 2026
Nova Linea Musica's Composer-in-Residence | Chicago Contemporary Classical Music
Years before Nova Linea Musica, Chicago's home for contemporary classical chamber music, existed, before there was a mission statement or a first season, there was a moment. "Silver Dagger was the piece that opened the door for me," says NLM President and Executive Director Michele Mohammadi. "Stacy took an Appalachian folk song and transformed it into something lyrical and deeply compelling. From the first strike on the piano strings, the trio came alive in a way I'd never experienced before. I'm hooked, I thought. Everything I've built with Nova Linea Musica traces back to that engaging performance."
That a single piece could spark something that would eventually become an entire organization dedicated to commissioning and presenting new music says as much about Garrop's artistry as it does about the power of the music itself. Her work doesn't just reward trained ears. It reaches people and pulls them in.
Chicago-based composer Stacy Garrop tells stories. That's the thread that runs through everything she writes, whether it's a full oratorio, a chamber opera, or a work for solo instrument. Her music takes audiences on journeys that are sometimes simple and luminous, sometimes dark and complex, but always shaped by narrative. It's an approach rooted in a conviction that storytelling is one of the most fundamentally human things we do.
Garrop's path wasn't conventional. She studied composition at the University of Michigan, earned her master's at the University of Chicago and her doctorate at Indiana University, then spent sixteen years teaching composition and orchestration at Roosevelt University in Chicago. In 2016, she made a decision that few composers in her position would risk: she walked away from a full-time faculty role to compose on her own terms. The bet paid off. In the years since, she's built one of the most active and wide-ranging compositional careers in American music.
Her catalog spans orchestral works, chamber music, opera, choral music, and art song. She's received commissions from the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, the St. Louis Symphony, the Cabrillo Festival Orchestra, the Omaha Symphony, the Kronos Quartet, Chanticleer, and the U.S. Marine Band and U.S. Navy Band, among many others. Her honors include the Barlow Prize, a Fromm Music Foundation Grant, an Arts and Letters Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and three Barlow Endowment commissions. She is a Cedille Records artist with works on over a dozen recordings, and her oratorio Terra Nostra was released in 2024.
Through all of this, Garrop has remained one of Chicago's most important voices in contemporary classical music and new music. She lives here. She composes here. Her work has been performed by the city's most important musical institutions, from the Chicago Symphony to Chicago Opera Theater to Chicago a cappella, where she serves as an ongoing mentor for the HerVoice Emerging Women Choral Composers Competition.
When Nova Linea Musica launched its contemporary chamber music series in Chicago, Stacy Garrop was the natural choice for Composer-in-Residence. The relationship between her music and this series is not incidental. It is foundational. NLM exists, in part, because her music proved that new work could move someone who had never encountered it before.
In Season 1, NLM commissioned Garrop's Jarba, Mare Jarba for the ~Nois Saxophone Quartet and the Black Oak Ensemble, which received its world premiere on March 12, 2025. In Season 2, the commission deepened: Under the Shimmering Aspens, a new work written specifically for the NLM Piano Trio (violinist Rabia Brooke, cellist Haddon Kay, and pianist Tamila Salimdjanova), received its world premiere on January 21, 2026 in Chicago.
Garrop wrote of the piece: "I have long admired the aspen trees in the Rocky Mountain National Park of Colorado. Aspens have distinctive heart-shaped leaves that are attached to the branches by thin, very flexible stems. This allows the leaves to easily flutter (or 'quake') in even the smallest of breezes. I find aspen trees particularly breathtaking in late September, when the green leaves turn a beautiful shade of yellow before falling off the tree. On a bright, cloudless day, the yellow leaves light up like gold in the sun while shimmering in the wind."
That image, gold leaves catching the light, each one trembling on its own stem but part of something larger, is as good a description of what Nova Linea Musica aspires to be as anything we could write ourselves.
As Composer-in-Residence, Garrop's role extends beyond her own commissions. She is a creative partner in the series, a voice in the artistic conversation, and a bridge between NLM and the broader world of contemporary composition. Her presence signals what NLM values: artists who are deeply committed to their craft, rooted in their community, and willing to take creative risks in the service of something new.
Stacy Garrop is the Composer-in-Residence of Nova Linea Musica, a contemporary classical chamber music series in Chicago dedicated to commissioning and premiering new works.www.stacygarrop.comwww.novalineamusica.org
