Sophie McMillan-Myers writes music that is concerned with memory, fragility, and playfulness, as well as the agency, labor, consent, and physicality of the performer(s). Her work has been performed by Spektral Quartet, Yarn/Wire, Quatuor Bozzini, Vertixe Sonora, [Switch~ Ensemble], cellist Hannah Collins, pianists Daniel Pesca and John McDonald, and conductors Gil Rose, John Page, and Lio Kuokman. Her first orchestral piece, Bright Shadows, won New England Conservatory’s inaugural orchestral composition competition in 2013 and was premiered in Jordan Hall.
Sophie has a PhD from the University of Chicago and holds degrees from New England Conservatory and Tufts University in composition, music theory, and cognitive science. She has studied composition with Augusta Read Thomas, Sam Pluta, Anthony Cheung, Marta Ptaszyńska, Kati Agócs, John Heiss, and John McDonald.
Sophie is also a conductor, violist, and violinist. She served as assistant conductor and principal violist of the Tufts University orchestras from 2013 to 2015, and has premiered works by many composers as a conductor and a performer. As a violist and arranger, she is half of the video game music cover duo Frog & Cid, whose debut album Boss Chamber Music was released in 2016.
Sophie McMillan-Myers' piece Workaround premiered with the Grossman Ensemble on December 6, 2019.
Performance notes:
Performers’ labor is often expected to be invisible — the ideal of an “effortless” performance is instilled in performers early on. In my recent music, I’ve been exploring what happens when performers are relieved of this obligation in various ways, and Workaround continues that exploration. The piece begins with an intense, taxing passage that serves as a ritornello or rondo theme from which the piece (and the musicians) can’t escape. The piece repeatedly drags itself back to variations of this opening material, no matter what kind of music has been explored in the interim. Fragility, resilience, pleading, compliance, introspection, panic — all of these musical ways of being are unable to insulate themselves from the ritornello that asserts itself as inevitable and singular. At best, they result in the ritornello softening or changing itself, and at worst their potential development is cut off and erased by it. Ultimately, the solution to the problem posed by the ritornello can’t come from within the piece itself. The workaround lies in the performers recognizing and exercising their individual and collective power to refuse to participate in the cycle. By withholding their labor from the system that the piece has operated under for the first eleven minutes or so, the performers open up a freer space, where solidarity, joy, and play are possible. The title, Workaround, refers, of course, to this end-run around the problems the piece is facing. But it also refers to the cycle itself — the performers are working around the same material over and over again until they discover their solution. And at the risk of being too cute, it’s also a piece about labor (or work) that is in a modified rondo form, always coming back around to the same theme. I owe a major debt of gratitude to several people for this piece. My brilliant teacher and dissertation advisor Augusta Read Thomas, every fantastic member of the Grossman Ensemble, and the wonderful Michael Lewanski were all generous, thoughtful, supportive, and deeply helpful to me as I worked out the ideas of the piece. I thought a bunch about the ideas and form of Haydn’s Farewell Symphony and the recent Netflix show Russian Doll (created by Natasha Lyonne, Leslye Headland, and Amy Poehler) while writing this piece, as well. And most importantly, I am constantly inspired by and grateful for the labor, solidarity, and bravery of workers who stand up for a better world — most recently and locally, the Chicago Teachers Union, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s union, the Lyric Opera Orchestra union, and the graduate student, adjunct professor, and nurses unions here at the University of Chicago.