Ross Griffey

American composer Ross S. Griffey is the recipient of several national and regional awards, including an ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Award, first prize in the Voices of Change/ Dallas Symphony Orchestra Texas Young Composers Project, and first prize in the New York Composers Circle Competition. Recent and notable performances of his work include the premiere of Night Music by the New Juilliard Ensemble, the premiere of Brooke on Love at last year’s Oxford Lieder Festival, and a performance of A Catalogue of Agonies as part of an installation piece by artist and musician Julie Zhu. As a composer, Mr. Griffey has participated in music festivals including June in Buffalo and the Conservatoire Américain (in Fontainebleau, France), and as a writer, he attended the Rubin Institute for Music Criticism in San Francisco in 2016.

A native of Houston, Texas, Mr. Griffey studied first at Rice University, with composers Pierre Jalbert and Shih-Hui Chen, and later at the Juilliard School, with composers Samuel Adler and Robert Beaser. Mr. Griffey also earned his doctorate from Juilliard, authoring an award-winning dissertation on support for composers by the National Endowment for the Arts. Last year, Mr. Griffey was awarded an Albi Rosenthal Visiting Fellowship in Music at the University of Oxford’s Bodleian Libraries to compose a new song cycle about the Arctic; the events at this year’s Oxford Lieder Festival are the culmination of that project. Mr. Griffey currently lives in Houston, where he serves on the faculty of Lone Star College.