Andrea Clearfield

Biography

Clearfield was born on August 29, 1960 in Philadelphia, PA, and grew up in the local Main Line suburb of Bala-Cynwyd. Her parents loved music and often played chamber music in the living room. Clearfield started playing piano at age 5 and later played flute and timpani in the school bands and orchestras at Cynwyd Elementary, Bala-Cynwyd Junior High and Lower Merion High School. She also played in rock, folk and world music groups. Her father is a physician and her mother a painter, and she has one brother. Clearfield took an interest to composition early on, arranging pop songs from the radio for voices, strings and percussion.

Clearfield met her first "woman composer mentor," Margaret Garwood, when she attended Muhlenberg College. Clearfield later went on to earn a M.M. in Piano from the Philadelphia College of Performing Arts (now the University of the Arts), and subsequently received a D.M.A. in Composition from Temple University, where her principal teacher was Maurice Wright.

Clearfield is the founder and host, since 1986, of the Philadelphia Salon concert series, featuring contemporary, classical, jazz, world, electronic, multimedia, and spoken word arts. A meeting place for musicians of diverse styles, she curates these events in Philadelphia and around the US.

She was the featured composer for the 2014 Women Composers Festival of Hartford.

In 2016, she was awarded a Pew Fellowship.

Compositional style

Clearfield writes for opera, orchestra, chorus, chamber ensembles, dance and multimedia collaborations and has composed a number of large-scale cantatas. Her style is lyrical and rhythmically compelling, with lush harmonies and contrasting fields of texture and sound color. Her work on the Golem Psalms includes the practice of gematria which she embeds into the composition. Clearfield's piece, Unremembered Wings, is based on the poetry of Pablo Naruda.

Discography

Chamber

Vocal

Choral

Orchestra

Electronics