Composer

COMPOSER

“Her music has been described as haunting, stunning, and picturesque—even ineffable. It casts a spell on us that leaves time behind, taking us into a different kind of present, a different kind of now (Alison Young, Minnesota Public Radio)."

Ranging in style from cinematic to spectral, Kirsten Soriano (formerly Kirsten Broberg) composes for orchestra, choir, symphonic winds, chamber ensembles, chamber voices, dance, multimedia and film. Her music spans from extremely expressive and lyrical to highly colorful, evocative and textural. She explores concepts of time and space while highlighting transformations of timbre, texture, ornamentation and gestures on the surface and within the structure of the music. Her sound world ranges from the fragility of barely audible and whispering colors to pure, resonant and complex timbres, which she treats as states through which sound evolves over time. Further, the modulation each parameter undergoes, is paramount to the resulting form, sequence and proportional duration of musical events. As a result, form is generated through process with domains organically evolving, spawned by the intersection of one or more permutations. Through this, shapes and creates an effective and emotive dramatic profile for each piece she composes.

MUSIC FOR FILM AND DANCE

Kirsten Soriano has composed music for films and multimedia projects and has taken lessons with ten-time Emmy-award winning composer Bruce Broughton. The film 489 Days, for which she wrote the soundtrack, won best documentary in the Thin Line film festival and the film Lines, for which she composed an experimental electronic soundtrack, was featured in Electronic Music Midwest. Kirsten Soriano
studied dance formally for over a decade and studied composing for choreography with Claudia Howard Queen. Some of her recent dance collaborations include "Arcs" in collaboration with choreographer Amy Hoang, "Rise" in collaboration with Lydia Miller and "Impulse" in collaboration with Anthony Roberts. She was been commissioned with support for New Music USA to compose a new work for the Heartland Marimba Quartet and dancers in 2020.

INSPIRATION FROM TEXT, NARRATIVES AND POETRY

She has a passion for language, narratives, text and poetry. In addition to her various degrees in music composition and music theory, she has earned a degree in creative writing and has composed several dozen art songs and choral works. Through this, she has set text in a number languages including English, Spanish, German and ancient Japanese. She also shares her enthusiasm for text and vocal music with her students in a course she teaches entitled The Contemporary Voice: Contemporary Vocal Music, Text Setting and Repertoire.

CONNECTION TO NATURE

The first home she remembers is a log house her father built in the Minnesota woods, which resulted in her feeling a deep connection to nature. She also relates strongly to music that is evocative of nature by impressionist composers Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel and more recent composers such as Olivier Messiaen, Toru Takemitsu, Tristan Murail, Kaija Saariaho and John Luther Adams. This connection reveals itself in her own works as she often creates gestural profiles that represent images such as rain, wind, snow, stars, cascades, tendrils, roots and branches. These gestures can be most vividly found in her Natura, Waters of Time and In Search of Imagery cycles. They are also notable in her choir piece, I Carry Your Heart, for chorus, violoncello and piano.

INFLUENCE OF SPECTRAL MUSIC

Spectral music, especially by composers such as Gérard Grisey, Tristan Murail, Per Nørgård, Jonathan Harvey, Kaija Saariaho and Claude Vivier, has greatly influenced Kirsten Soriano as a composer. She studied music composition privately with Tristan Murail, Kaija Saariaho and Phillipe Hurel in France during summer 2013. Additionally, the harmonic and pitch content in her work often involves various overtone series, undertone series and/or spectral analysis of sounds in nature and/or of timbres of instruments. She has also been working on connecting pitch materials within her works and between various works her cycles via shared partials, or pivot partials, that can provide seamless pitch transitions between different segments of music.

MODULARITY AND CYCLES OF EXTRACTABLE WORKS

For the past several years, Kirsten Soriano has been engaged in composing a number of cycles of extractable works and modular pieces. The pieces in the cycles may be performed as stand-alone works and can also function as smaller parts of a multi-movement cyclical formal design when programmed for a single event. This is evident in her dissertation, An Analysis and Contextualization for Resonant Strands: a Cycle of Five Extractable Works for Piano, Bowed Piano and String Quartet. To date, Soriano's cycles include Resonant Strands for various combinations of piano, bowed piano, and string quartet and Natura—a concert-length set of eleven works ranging from solo instrument to full orchestra—which contains overlapping and modular elements. Additional cycles she has composed include The Waters of Time for soprano and chamber ensemble; Dream-Paths for female voice, electric guitar, piano/prepared piano and percussion; Between Darkness and Light for French horn, percussion and strings; In Search of Imagery for chamber ensembles/chamber orchestra and From the Ends of the Earth (in progress) for four choirs, organ, orchestra and handbells. In her modular wind symphony, Transformative States, the pieces may be performed in succession or particular segments may be bypassed.