Miller Theatre at Columbia University's mission to create new works takes center stage as Miller announces Season Two of its podcast Mission: Commission, launching in April 2022. The new season will feature all new composers, new musicians, the same brilliant production team, and the same six-week timeline. 

The six-episode, free weekly podcast aims to demystify the process of how classical music gets made, lifting the curtain to reveal the inner lives of three strikingly different composers as they create vibrant works of new music in just six weeks. This season's composers have each been the subject of a Composer Portrait at Miller: Oscar Bettison, Vijay Iyer, and Kate Soper. 

In a new twist for Season Two, all three composers will write for the same ensemble: the Grammy Award-winning Parker Quartet, called “something extraordinary” by The New York Times. Vijay Iyer's quintet will feature himself on piano, and Kate Soper will join as vocalist/narrator for her work.

As in Season One, the composers check in weekly with podcast host Melissa Smey (Miller’s Executive Director) to discuss their processes along the way. Listeners will get a rare inside look as an artist creates—from the blank page to inspiration, risk-taking, road blocks and hard work, to the finished product. Recordings of the final pieces will be shared at the conclusion of the podcast. 

Mission: Commission was born after the COVID-19 shutdown in 2020, when Miller Theatre's in-person programming was on pause. Melissa Smey was determined to create opportunities for composers and musicians during the worst months of the pandemic. She and her team threw themselves into digital innovations, most notably Mission: Commission. Produced by seasoned podcast showrunner, audio producer, and journalist Golda Arthur and hosted by Smey, Season One featured composers Marcos Balter, Courtney Bryan, and Augusta Read Thomas and is available anywhere podcasts are available (click here to listen). Over the pandemic, Miller also produced a digital version of the theatre's beloved Pop-Up Concerts series, called Live from Columbia. These digital ventures have already reached people in 80 countries and 50 states, many of which are new audiences for Miller.

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"This is a brilliant idea, its intention to demystify 'how composers compose'."
— The Sunday Times (UK) 

"New works might be given a brief introduction from the stage, a program note or some advance press. What often gets lost is the story of creation — the hiccups and dead ends, the thrill of discovery. And that is central to 'Mission: Commission,' a collection of audio diaries and interviews with Melissa Smey, the Miller Theater’s executive director."
— The New York Times

"Presenting newly commissioned pieces by a broad range of living composers has always been fundamental to the programming philosophy at Columbia University’s Miller Theatre. Now a new podcast, 'Mission: Commission,' illuminates the evolution of three such works, from conception to fruition." 
— The New Yorker

Listen to KMFA's Staccato and Trilloquy speak with 
the creators of Mission: Commission in 2021

iTunes Top 25 Podcasts in Music (April 2021)

Oscar Bettison

Bettison’s music lives, thrillingly, on a razor’s edge between unpredictability and a groove wrought of full-bodied play. Born on the United Kingdom’s Channel Islands to Spanish and British parents, Bettison was fascinated from an early age by the interplay between the “weird, hazy, tenuous aural image” in his imagination and the wild effort to wrestle it onto the page. After studying in Amsterdam with Louis Andriessen and Martijn Padding, he learned to embrace this creative discomfort, crashing through challenges with fantastic, imaginative twists. As Bettison has said: “It’s not that refinement is a bad thing. But there are times when it can get in the way.” 

Watershed ensemble works like O Death and B&E (with aggravated assault) drew attention from press and audiences for their free-spirited play and integration of popular musical styles. Bettison was recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2017. 

Bettison continues to find inspiration in experimenting with different forms of music, composing more for orchestra in recent years: Remaking a Forest for Oregon Symphony premiered in 2019; Pale Icons of Night—his first violin concerto—for Courtney Orlando and Alarm Will Sound debuted in 2018; and Lights in Ashes (an orchestral reimagination of a movement from O Death) was premiered by the New World Symphony in 2017. Bettison’s first opera, The Light of Lesser Days, premiered in September 2021 in the Netherlands with the Asko|Schönberg ensemble. 

Bettison currently lives in New Jersey and is chair of the Composition Department of John Hopkins University’s Peabody Institute.

Described by The New York Times as a “social conscience, multimedia collaborator, system builder, rhapsodist, historical thinker and multicultural gateway,” Vijay Iyer has carved out a unique path as an influential, prolific, shape-shifting presence in twenty-first-century music. A composer and pianist active across multiple musical communities, Iyer has created a consistently innovative, emotionally resonant body of work over the last twenty-five years, earning him a place as one of the leading music-makers of his generation. He has received a MacArthur Fellowship, a Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, a United States Artist Fellowship, a Grammy nomination, the Alpert Award in the Arts, and two German “Echo” awards, and was voted Downbeat’s “Jazz Artist of the Year” four times in the last decade. 

Iyer’s musical language is grounded in the rhythmic traditions of South Asia and West Africa, the African American creative music movement of the ‘60s and ‘70s, and the lineage of composer-pianists from Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk to Alice Coltrane and Geri Allen. He has released twenty-four albums of his music, most recently UnEasy (ECM Records, 2021), a trio session with drummer Tyshawn Sorey and bassist Linda May Han Oh; The Transitory Poems (ECM, 2019), a live duo recording with pianist Craig Taborn; Far From Over (ECM, 2017) with the award-winning Vijay Iyer Sextet; and A Cosmic Rhythm with Each Stroke (ECM, 2016) a suite of duets with visionary composer-trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith.

Iyer is also an active composer for classical ensembles and soloists. His works have been commissioned and premiered by the Brentano Quartet, Imani Winds, Bang on a Can All-Stars, Silkroad Ensemble, International Contemporary Ensemble, Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, LA Philharmonic, American Composers Orchestra, and virtuosi Matt Haimowitz, Claire Chase, Shai Wosner, and Jennifer Koh, among others. He recently served as composer-in-residence at London’s Wigmore Hall, music director of the Ojai Music Festival, and artist-in-residence at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. A tireless collaborator, he has written big-band music for Arturo O’Farrill and Darcy James Argue, remixed classic recordings of Talvin Singh and Meredith Monk, joined forces with legendary musicians Henry Threadgill, Reggie Workman, Zakir Hussain, and L. Subramanian, and developed interdisciplinary work with Teju Cole, Carrie Mae Weems, Mike Ladd, Prashant Bhargava, and Karole Armitage.

A longtime New Yorker, Iyer lives in central Harlem with his wife and daughter. He teaches at Harvard University in the Department of Music and the Department of African and African American Studies. He is a Steinway artist.

Kate Soper

katesoper.com

Kate Soper is a composer, performer, and writer whose work explores the integration of drama and rhetoric into musical structure, the slippery continuums of expressivity, intelligibility and sense, and the wonderfully treacherous landscape of the human voice. She has been hailed by The Boston Globe as "a composer of trenchant, sometimes discomfiting, power" and by The New Yorker for her "limpid, exacting vocalism, impetuous theatricality, and mastery of modernist style." 

A Pulitzer Prize finalist, she has received awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, The Koussevitzky Foundation, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, among others. Praised by The New York Times for her "lithe voice and riveting presence," she performs frequently as a new music soprano and has been featured as a composer/vocalist on the MATA Festival, Miller Theatre Composer Portraits series, Chicago Symphony Orchestra's MusicNOW series, and the LA Philharmonic's Green Umbrella series. 

As a writer of fiction and non-fiction, she has been published by McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, The Massachusetts Review, and PAJ. 

She is the Iva Dee Hiatt Professor of music at Smith College and a co-director of Wet Ink, a new music ensemble dedicated to seeking out adventurous music across aesthetic boundaries.

Parker Quartet

parkerquartet.com

Inspiring performances, luminous sound, and exceptional musicianship are the hallmarks of the GRAMMY Award-winning Parker Quartet. Renowned for its dynamic interpretations and polished, expansive colors, the group has rapidly distinguished itself as one of the preeminent ensembles of its generation.

The Parker Quartet is currently in its eighth year as Blodgett Artists-in-Residence at Harvard University where they serve as faculty members in the music department. Recent season highlights have included performances at the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, Lake Champlain Chamber Music Festival, Bard Summerscape, and Music Toronto, and virtual concerts for Chamber Music Northwest, Rockport Chamber Music Festival, and the National Gallery. Upcoming appearances include San Antonio Chamber Music Society, Konzerthaus Berlin, Deutschlandfunk in Cologne, Germany, and premieres of works by Jeremy Gill and Felipe Lara.

The Quartet recently released its debut recording on ECM New Series with music of Kurtág and Dvorák. In response to the album, Gramophone wrote, “If you wanted to make the point that 21st-century string quartet-playing is defined by a virtuosity so agile that it’s indistinguishable from the process of emotional expression, you’d be hard pushed to find a better illustration than this new album from the Parker Quartet…”

Other recent recordings include music of Beethoven for the Monte Carlo Spring Festival, Mendelssohn for Nimbus Records, Bartók for Zig-Zag Territoires, and Ligeti for Naxos, for which they received a GRAMMY Award for Best Chamber Music Performance.

Melissa Smey

Producer Golda Arthur and the Team

Mission: Commission is produced by Golda Arthur, an independent podcast showrunner, audio producer, and journalist. She has launched and run many podcasts at Vox Media including Land of the Giants: The Rise of Amazon and the daily news show Today Explained. During her time at Marketplace, she was showrunner for the award-winning narrative technology podcast Codebreaker. Prior to her work in the U.S. she worked in London for the BBC World Service in audio reporting, producing, and editing.
 

The full Mission: Commission team:
Golda Arthur, Producer
Melissa Smey, Co-Creator, Producer & Host
Adrienne Stortz, Co-Creator & Producer
Lauren Cognetti, Co-Creator & Assistant Producer
Taylor Ricco, Assistant Producer
Erick Gomez, Sound Designer & Engineer

Miller Theatre

Major support for Mission: Commission is provided by the 
Francis Goelet Charitable Lead Trusts

Miller Theatre 's 2021-22 Season is supported by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature,
and by the Howard Gilman Foundation.
Additional support is provided by the National Endowment for the Arts.