New Scores: The Cone Composition Institute Concert

Composer, pianist, and conductor Apollonio Maiello works across a wide range of musical languages. He has collaborated with leading orchestras and institutions including the Radio Filharmonisch Orkest (NL), the Richmond Symphony Orchestra (USA), the Orchestra Sinfonica di Sanremo (IT), and the Staatsoper Hannover (DE).

His music has been performed and commissioned by ensembles such as Ensemble Sentieri Selvaggi (IT), Intercontinental Ensemble (NL), Hear Now Berlin (DE), Orlando Contemporary Chamber Orchestra (USA), ShoutHouse Ensemble (USA), Nymphéas Trombone Quartet (NL), Sputter Box (USA), and NEMA Ensemble (IT), and by soloists including Alexandra Sostmann and Alex Potter.

His work has been presented at venues and festivals including Muziekgebouw aan ’t IJ (NL), TivoliVredenburg (NL), Grachtenfestival (NL), Princeton University (USA), Theaterhaus Stuttgart (DE), Heidelberger Schlossfestspiele (DE), Bayerischer Rundfunk (DE), Accademia Musicale Chigiana (IT), and Teatro Grande di Brescia (IT).

He has also worked as an arranger with Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter Becca Stevens. His music is released on BR-KLASSIK, AVROTROS Klassiek, Neuklang, and Backlash Music.

He currently works in the Community and Engagement Program at the Staatsoper Hannover as a composer and music director.

Composer’s Note: Staring at the Sun
Staring at the Sun explores the unsettling moment when mortality shifts from abstraction to personal reality. To stare at the sun is to confront something overwhelming: a force that sustains life yet exceeds what we can endure. The piece reflects on fragility, shaped by personal experience, generational change, and a world marked by pandemic and conflict. Musically, it combines a persistent, pulse-driven energy with luminous harmonic colors inspired by Olivier Messiaen. The friction between ecstatic harmonies and embodied temporal motion lies at the center of the work’s musical language.

T. Gregory Bloomfield is a multimedia composer and educator whose work is recognized for its “unpredictable” (Third Coast Review) qualities. Through distorted time and meters, obscured melodies, and delicate and hazy harmonies, he creates a variety of electric, meditative environments for the mind to become lost within. Working with a collaborative-first mindset, his projects are often combined with elements from across different mediums, including poetry, art, and dance. Since August 2025, he has served as a Lecturer in Music Theory at Eastern Michigan University.

The recipient of accolades including the Harvard University’s Fromm Foundation Fellowship and the GSVC Karen Slack Prize, he has collaborated with ensemble and organizations such as the JACK Quartet, the Rhythm Method, Hypercube, Unheard-Of//Ensemble, and the Owen/Cox Dance Group. His works have been featured internationally at festivals and venues including: Avaloch Farm Music Institute (NH), CBDNA (MI), Nief-Norf (TN), Heidelberg University New Music Festival (OH), the U.S. Navy Band Saxophone Symposium (VA), Ear Taxi New Music Festival (IL), Lake George Music Festival (NY), Hill Auditorium (MI), Dublin International Chamber Music Festival (Ireland), International Trombone Festival (Canada), International Clarinet Association New Music Weekend, and the Red Note New Music Festival (IL). He has been a composer fellow at CCI, Composers Conference, the NATS Mentorship Program for Composers, Suncoast Composer Fellowship Program, and the JACK Quartet Studio.

Bloomfield has studied composition and electronic music at Illinois State University (B.M.) and the University of Michigan (M.M.), where he received the Dorothy Greenwald Fellowship. His primary teachers include Bright Sheng, Michael Daugherty, and Carl Schimmel. In Fall 2026, he will begin further graduate studies in composition at the Curtis Institute of Music.

Composer’s Note: fragrances of something sweet
I wrote this piece about a particular memory I had with my grandmother Mary, who I had been thinking about a lot over the nine months while composing. She was the first person who introduced me to coffee, which I love a lot now. After always being refused the drink by my mom, I remember I jumped at the opportunity to have it, which oddly, resulted in me being completely knocked out on her living room floor. In every cup of coffee I have to this day, I think about her. The title “something sweet” refers to coffee, but also my grandmother who was someone incredibly sweet, kind, and supportive.

Gillian Rae Perry is a composer and songwriter whose work is dedicated to themes of mental health, vulnerability, and interconnectedness. She grew up on a bird farm in rural Texas, and her first compositions were written for the birds.

Perry was the Vanguard Emerging Opera Composer with Chicago Opera Theater during the 2022-2024 seasons where she wrote her first opera, The Weight of Light. Perry is a 2026 Opera America Discovery Grant Awardee for her opera Desert Bloom and she recently released a singer-songwriter album titled gilly's garden with support from New Music USA's Creator Fund. Her work has been performed by the Atlanta Opera, Chicago Opera Theater, Chicago Philharmonic, Intersection Music, and the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra. Perry’s work has been described as‬‭ “sweet and sensitive” (Parterre Box) as well as “gentle, introspective, caring, important,‬ and beautiful” (Music City Review).‬

With degrees in both film and music composition, as well as growing up a theater kid, Perry actively integrates art forms outside of music into her artistic practice. Perry is also influenced by text and poetry and she released her first collection of poetry, What Will I Wish for Now?, in 2024. She holds an MFA in music composition from the California Institute of the Arts and is currently a DMA candidate at the Peabody Institute, where she studies with Kevin Puts.

Composer’s Note: if we looked, would we see?
In our day-to-day life, how do we decide where to look? How do we decide what to notice and what to un-notice? What happens when we, all of us, look at the same thing? We are often encouraged to be overwhelmed, distracted, and apathetic. These are the states of being that create ideal conditions for injustice and corruption to thrive. What would happen if we did not turn away from suffering, but instead truly looked at it? What would happen if we did not turn away from beauty, but searched for it, actively? What could we see?

With music described as “accomplished and appealing” (San Diego Story) and “shimmering…euphoric” (Chicago Classical Review), Max Vinetz is an award-winning composer whose music thrives at the intersection of improvisatory, popular, and traditional classical forms, exploring how these convergences shape and reflect identity transformation over time. His work often focuses on the perception of rhythmic and timbral events, weaving intricate relationships between narrative, musical objects, and sonic artifacts across various media.

Max is a recipient of a Koussevitzky Commission from the Library of Congress, a Fromm Foundation Commission, a Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, The Druckman Prize from Aspen Music Festival and School, the ASCAP Leo Kaplan Award, ASCAP’s Morton Gould Award (2018/2020/2025), the Paul and Christiane Cooper Prize, and the Gardner Prize from the American Viola Society among numerous others. As a Yale undergraduate, Max won the Beekman Cannon Friends Prize, awarded for a “musical composition exhibiting unusual originality and promise,” the Abraham Beekman Cox Prize awarded to the “most promising and gifted composer” in the junior class, and was also awarded the Lewis P. Curtis Fellowship, the Tristan Perlroth Prize, and the R.J.R. Cohen Fellowship for Musical Performance (2017, 2018).

Max holds degrees from Yale University (BA), Rice University Shepherd School of Music (MM), and Princeton University (MFA, PhD), and counts Steve Mackey, Donnacha Dennehy, Christopher Theofanidis, Dan Trueman, Tyondai Braxton, Juri Seo, Kathryn Alexander, Kurt Stallmann, and Karim Al-Zand, among his important teachers and mentors. He is serving as a Lecturer in the Princeton Music Department in Spring 2026.

Composer’s Note: Any Thing Passes
“They pass, I also pass, any thing passes, none can be interdicted/None but are accepted, none but shall be dear to me.” –Walt Whitman, “Song of the Open Road”

Any Thing Passes came to me while driving from Aspen to Santa Fe in July of 2024. It was my first time experiencing the grand majesty and immensity of the Colorado Rocky Mountains. While ascending through the mountains, the light became increasingly golden, illuminating rushing rivers and lush, verdant fields. Crossing the summit of Independence Pass, I felt like I had risen into the sky. I saw snow-lined peaks in front of me, and miles beyond were valleys brimming with wildflowers and lush greenery. Upon arriving in northern New Mexico, the roads were lined with towering sunflowers. In light of a family tragedy and its aftermath that I experienced since 2021, I never knew my life would be so beautiful. Any Thing Passes is a play on Independence Pass, and a Whitman-inspired mantra, that the worst will pass, with lightness waiting on the other side.