Artist’s Statement
Susanna unlocks new harmonic realms by playing with familiar tonal constructs and combining them with new ones to create a unique musical language, one that invites the listener to engage in shared inner experiences and inspires them to respond with curiosity, empathy, and delight to what lies just on the other side of expectation. Drawing on the world building of speculative fiction, a post-colonial lens on power structures, and the lived experience of being genderqueer, Susanna creates music that is as enchanting as it is critical.
Short Bio
An award-winning and internationally-performed composer, Susanna Payne-Passmore creates music that balances grounded power with a playful lyricism. Susanna’s compositions integrate intuitive expansions of traditional tonality, experimental tonal constructs, and the unfamiliar timbres of extended techniques to create a unique and expressive musical language. Susanna recently graduated from the University of Oregon with a Masters in Music Composition and the highest graduate award after writing and premiering an hour-long chamber opera, Captain, and founding the Composers of Oregon Chamber Orchestra, a student-led ensemble dedicated to premiering new student orchestral works. Past performers have included the Wet Ink Ensemble, the Archaea Tree Ensemble, Sybarite5, the Pacific Northwest Chamber Orchestra, Esteli Gomez, James Shield, and members of the Sarasota Orchestra. Susanna is a Fulbright recipient and was a finalist for the 2015 Morton Gould award.
Long(ish) Bio
Susanna Payne-Passmore is an award-winning and internationally-performed composer living and working in Eugene, OR whose music has been performed by the Composers of Oregon Chamber Orchestra, the Wet Ink Ensemble, clarinetist James Shields, soprano Esteli Gomez, and contralto Christine Jenora Duncan. Collaborators include intermedia specialist and choreographer Mira Treatman, the dynamic Archaea Tree Ensemble, and illustrator Alexa Dubus.
In 2012, Susanna completed a self-designed major in Music Composition at the New College of Florida with Dr. Steve Miles and Dr. Bret Aarden and defended a thesis on music and meaning that used multiple modalities to explore how intangible oscillations become moving works of art, an enigma engaged by many later compositions. After college, Susanna traveled the Republic of Georgia as a Fulbright recipient, teaching English and studying one of the oldest known traditions of vocal polyphony. These experiences culminated in an original composition for three voices premiered at the Batumi Contemporary Classical Music Festival. Upon returning, Susanna won the 2013 Mary Bussman Emerging Woman Composer award for the choral composition “Shine”.
Entering graduate studies at the University of Oregon, Susanna accepted a fellowship to further develop an intuitive harmonic composition language and to mount the first large-scale production of Captain, a chamber opera for contralto, baritone, soprano, treble, and chamber orchestra with an original libretto and a genderqueer protagonist. The opera was premiered in June 2018. While at the University of Oregon, Susanna also founded the Composers of Oregon Chamber Orchestra and directed its first concert premiering six new student orchestral compositions. Recent harmonic explorations from this period include: a nonatonic recursive modality; a multi-octave, modally-rotating scale; a “piano clef” system of notation for inside the piano works, and a bi-triadic hexachord articulated through non-linear planing. Susanna graduated from the University of Oregon with a Masters in Music Composition in 2018 and was awarded the music school’s highest accolade: Outstanding Graduate Scholar.
When not composing, Susanna enjoys sipping tea, playing with cats, devouring books, and plotting new librettos.