Amy Scurria

Biography

Amy Scurria is an award-winning composer of operas, orchestral, choral, chamber, and solo works. Scurria is the recipient of several commissions including from the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Minnesota Orchestra. She is the recipient of the Duke University Evan Frankel Fellowship, the Duke University Aleane Webb Dissertation Research Award, the Duke University Summer Research Fellowship, Honorary Membership to Sigma Alpha Iota, several ASCAP Plus Awards, the Haddonfield Young Composers’ Award, and several other awards and honors. Her music is published by Theodore Presser Company and by her own company, Adamo Press.

The press has said she writes with a “powerful, musically poetic language” (Boston Musical Intelligencer), “her artistic personality is quite mature” … and “a tremendous technique infuses the music, but Scurria never uses it to cover up a paucity of ideas. She’s an honest workman – the real goods.” She is a “young composer with something to say” (Classical Net).

Securing her first commission by age 19 and her first orchestral premiere by 24, Scurria has had performances throughout the United States, England, Brazil, Spain, Portugal, France, China, and Japan. Her degrees include a PhD and masters in music composition from Duke University, a bachelors in music composition from the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University, a masters in music composition from the Peabody Conservatory, composition studies at Westminster Choir College in Princeton, NJ, and study at La Schola Cantorum (currently named the EAMA) in Paris, France.

​Scurria has recently completed her second full-length opera, ALICE, An Operatic Wonderland in collaboration with Soprano, Producer, and Librettist Kelly Balmaceda, and Zane Corriher, librettist. She is currently working on a new, abstract opera with British actor, Jeff Shankley. DELIRIUM is a reflection on war and its wide-reaching effects.
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Scurria believes that "Music is a powerful and unusual language that, when spoken authentically, can reach the deepest part of the human spirit."