Women Composers in Los Angeles

Kay Rhie

Kay Rhie is a composer of contemporary classical music which often explores the issues of belonging and the science of acoustics. She is inspired by a wide-ranging palette of classical, film, and European avant-garde music as well as various literary and artistic traditions.  Her opera Quake will premiere in June at UCLA Freud Playhouse. A commission from the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Five Petals, about displacement from home and a desire to belong, will be premiered during the 2024-2025 season at Disney Hall.

Ms. Rhie was a recipient of the Charles Ives Fellowship given by the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2008, which said her music has “vehemence and reticence,” where “intimacy and plainness co-exist.” She was a Rieman and Baketel Music Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute of
Advanced Study at Harvard University from 2008-2009. Ms. Rhie won the Grand Prize for Student Compositions at the Ojai Music Festival in 2001. At the Tanglewood Music Center, she was the Otto Eckstein Composition Fellow and the winner of the Geffen-Solomon New Music
Commission in 2007. Residences have included the Aspen Music Festival (2003), the Chamber Music Conference and Composers’ Forum of the East (2004), and the Banff Centre for the Arts (2005).

Her works have been performed at the London Festival of American Music, the Seal Bay Festival of American Chamber Music and the Tanglewood Music Center. It has been performed by the the BBC Singers, Ensemble X, the Moscow Contemporary Chamber Ensemble, the Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra, members of the Tongyeong International Music Festival (TIMF), and
Winsor Music.

Her musical studies began in South Korea on the piano from the age of seven, and continued at the University of California at Los Angeles. She received her Doctorate of Musical Arts in Composition from Cornell University in 2009, Her composition teachers include Samuel Adler, Paul Chihara, Donald Crockett, John Harbison, Stephen Hartke, Ian Krouse, David Lefkowitz, Colin Mathews, Roberto Sierra, and Steven Stucky.

Ms. Rhie is currently Assistant Professor of Composition and Theory at the University of California at Los Angeles.

Dara Taylor

Dara Taylor has emerged as a fresh voice in the world of scoring music to picture as evidenced by her score to the Lionsgate comedy Barb and Star Go To Vista Del Mar starring Kristen Wiig and Jamie Dornan, co-composed with Christopher Lennertz. Her credits include the action crime drama Echo Boomers starring Michael Shannon, the Universal Animation feature Curious George: Cape Ahoy, the Warner Brothers series Little Ellen, the Netflix series Bookmarks, the Netflix docuseries Trial By Media, the FX series Pride, and the Karen Allen-starred film Colewell, for which she won a 2019 Hollywood Music in Media award. 

As a score producer and composer for Chris Lennertz, Dara has contributed to major motion picture films and series including Bad Moms, the action-comedy sequel Shaft, Amazon's highly acclaimed television series The Boys, Netflix’s sci-fi series Lost in Space, The Happytime Murders, Uglydolls, and the long-running CW show Supernatural. In 2015, Dara was nominated for a Hollywood Music in Media Award for her score on the short film Undetectable, and in 2016, she participated in the Women in Film’s Women Composers in Media concert. In 2018, Dara was chosen as a fellow for the Sundance Institute Composers Lab and the following year she was chosen as one of the BMI Conducting for Composers Fellows. In 2021 she was chosen for both the Grammy NEXT program and the coveted Universal Composers Initiative. Up next for Dara is Amazon Studio’s highly anticipated film The Tender Bar, directed by Academy Award-winning filmmaker George Clooney.

Dara is a proud Executive Committee member for the Composers Diversity Collective, as well as a member of the Television Academy, Recording Academy, Society of Composers and Lyricists, Alliance of Women Film Composers, and Women in Media.

Nina Young

The music of composer Nina C. Young, associate professor of composition at USC Thornton, is characterized by an acute sensitivity to tone color, manifested in aural images of vibrant, arresting immediacy. Her experience in the electronic music studio informs her acoustic work, which takes as its given not melody and harmony but sound itself, continuously metamorphosing from one state to another. Her musical voice draws from elements of the classical canon, modernism, spectralism, American experimentalism, minimalism, electronic music and popular idioms. Her projects strive to create unique sonic environments that can be appreciated by a wide variety of audiences while challenging stylistic boundaries, auditory perception and notions of temporality.

Young’s works have been presented by Carnegie Hall, the National Gallery, the Whitney Museum, LA Phil’s Next on Grand and the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra’s Liquid Music Series. Her music has garnered international acclaim through performances by the American Composers Orchestra, the Milwaukee Symphony, the Minnesota Orchestra, the Phoenix Symphony, Le Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, the Argento Chamber Ensemble, Either/Or, the JACK Quartet, mise-en, wild Up and Yarn/Wire. Winner of the 2015-16 Rome Prize at the American Academy in Rome, Young has also received a Koussevitzky Commission, a Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship, a Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Salvatore Martirano Memorial Award, Aspen Music Festival’s Jacob Druckman Prize and honors from BMI, IAWM and ASCAP/SEAMUS.

Young’s current interests are collaborative, multidisciplinary works that touch on issues of sustainability, climate change, historical narratives and women’s rights. During the 2016-17 season, the American Composers Orchestra premiered Out of whose womb came the ice (commissioned by the Jerome Foundation) for baritone, orchestra, electronics and generative video, commenting on the ill-fated Ernest Shackleton trans-Antarctic expedition of 1914-17. Other commissions include a violin concerto for Jennifer Koh from the Philadelphia Orchestra, a new piece for the N.Y. Phil’s 2019-20 season and a new work for the EMPAC’s wavefield synthesis audio system with the American Brass Quintet.

Nina Young joined the faculty at USC Thornton in the 2019-20 school year. Before USC, she taught at the University of Texas at Austin’s Butler School of Music, where she was an assistant professor of composition and director of the Electronic Music Studios.

A graduate of McGill University and MIT, Young completed her DMA at Columbia University. She is co-artistic director of New York’s Ensemble Échappé.