14 Ransom Everglades LOG FALL 2026 That guidance was mission critical. Sierra’s music is the subject of a series of portrait recordings by Bridge Records. Arlene Sierra, Vol. 1, recorded by the International Contemporary Ensemble, was featured by NPR Classical, which described its “remarkable brilliance of color, rhythmic dexterity and playfulness.” The fourth volume in this series that spans around two decades, Birds and Insects, was released in 2025. Recent performers of her work include the London Sinfonietta, the Boston Symphony, the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, and the Tokyo Philharmonic. In Truel (2002-04), her first piano trio, the listener is taken into a musical battle between three performers who embody roles as tactical opponents or mathematical variables. Her second piano trio, Butterflies Remember A Mountain, was inspired by a study of monarch butterfly migration on which violinist Nicola Benedetti plays. It premiered at the BBC Proms and it is something you should take time out of your day to listen to. Sierra has been commissioned by the New York Philharmonic, was the first woman to win the Takemitsu Prize and received a Charles Ives Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her orchestral piece Moler for the Seattle Symphony received a Latin Grammy nomination for Best Contemporary Classical Composition in 2014: an apt honor for a composer born in Miami to a family with New York roots. Since leaving Ransom Everglades, Sierra has built a body of work in which butterflies navigate by mountain memory, Roman siege engineers and Darwinian finches share the same formal logic, and the natural world isn’t a decorative backdrop but a structural part of the message. Gramophone magazine called her music “combative and utterly compelling,” a phrase that captures the dual nature of a composer who has always known what she is fighting for and what she wants the world to hear. “I have been very impressed by the music Arlene has composed and by her many accomplishments,” Michael Daugherty said. “That desire to learn and drive I encountered when I met Arlene nearly 40 years ago is still alive and kicking today.” For the past two decades, Sierra has lived in London with her husband, British composer Kenneth Hesketh, and their son, Elliott, who is also an aspiring musician, She keeps her freelance career separate from her work as a professor at Cardiff University, and has adapted well to a British pace of life – its unpredictable weather and awkward modernity steeped in centuries of history. Our meeting, for example, took place at a 900-year-old church that runs a coffee shop and coworking space when religious services aren’t on. Sierra visited Ransom Everglades last April for the first time in years. She was amazed to see the physical transformation of the upper school campus, and even more excited to learn of its musical evolution. “I’m so happy to see the music provision at Ransom Everglades is infinitely better now,” she said. “Even though I studied piano privately with University of Miami Professor Rosalina Sackstein, there was little to no awareness of living composers, never mind women composers from any era. As soon as I learned this, I wanted to change it.” She’s been changing it in the most powerful way possible – with the creation of must-experience musical works. Women only started playing in professional, mixed-gender symphonies at the start of the 20th century. Addressing this gender imbalance has been a motivation throughout Sierra’s life – and it continues even today. “For years, I was in spaces where I was one of very few, and sometimes the only woman composer,” Sierra said. “I’d go to performances and festivals and realize mine was often the only woman’s voice to be heard. Things have improved in more recent years but there is still much work to be done.” “The Arlene I taught was animated by a fierce desire to create her own art and her own world of creative achievement.” – Martin Bresnick, composer
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