Eliza Brown is a composer of concert music, music-theater, and opera. Their works have been performed throughout the Americas and Europe by leading interpreters of new music, including Ensemble Dal Niente, Spektral Quartet, ensemble recherche, International Contemporary Ensemble, Network for New Music, Ensemble SurPlus, Quince Contemporary Vocal Ensemble, and Wild Rumpus New Music Collective.
Eliza’s music is frequently intertextual, opening dialogues with existing pieces of music, historical styles, and other cultural artifacts. Eliza’s work also explores the relationships between music and the other arts and humanities. They have engaged in interdisciplinary collaborations with practitioners of theater, dance, architecture, poetry, visual art, and film, frequently taking on a variety of artistic and administrative roles in these collaborations in addition to “composer.” Eliza views the building of intentional, project-specific collaborative processes as an essential part of their work.
In keeping with this interdisciplinary, collaborative focus, Eliza’s catalogue contains a significant amount of vocal chamber music and music-theater. After they won Center City Opera Theater’s art song competition in 2012, a scene from their opera Cosimo as Orpheus was workshopped and performed by CCOT in Philadelphia. They were subsequently selected for the inaugural Contemporary Opera workshop at the 2014 Darmstadt Summer Courses in Darmstadt, Germany, and their first opera, a one-act monodrama titled The Body of the State, was commissioned and premiered by Ensemble Dal Niente in Chicago in 2017. Based on the life and incarceration of Renaissance Spanish Queen Juana of Castile, The Body of the State was written in collaboration with six women who were at that time incarcerated at Indiana Women's Prison. In this piece and others, Eliza approaches vocal music as a form of storytelling in which text, vocal line and instrumental parts are equally responsible for carrying the story. Their vocal music is as influenced by their childhood experiences of communal folk singing as it is by the long history of opera and art song. They write original lyrics for many of their works.
At DePauw, Eliza teaches courses in music theory/musicianship, composition, and DePauw’s 21st Century Musician Initiative curriculum. They hold degrees from University of Michigan School of Music, Theater and Dance (BMus) and Northwestern University (DMA), where their primary mentors were Hans Thomalla and Lee Hyla. Eliza also has a long-time affiliation with the Walden School Young Musicians Program, a summer program focused on composition and improvisation where they spent many summers as a faculty member and Academic Dean. The Walden School’s unique, creativity-focused approach to music pedagogy is a deep influence on their teaching.