Nationally acclaimed award-winning composer Melissa Dunphy (b. 1980) has composed in a wide range of styles and mediums, particularly in the realm of theatre. Her large-scale choral work the Gonzales Cantata was performed at the 2009 Philadelphia Fringe Festival, and received rave press and reviews from The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Harper's Magazine, The Huffington Post, and MSNBC's Rachel Maddow. Melissa received an honorable mention in the 2009 ASCAP Lotte Lehmann Foundation Art Song Competition for her song for baritone "Black Thunder," which was premiered in 2008 at the Kimmel Center by Network for New Music. "What do you think I fought for at Omaha Beach?" a choral work in support of marriage equality, won in the 2010 Simon Carrington Chamber Singers Composition Competition and was premiered by the group under the baton of Mr. Carrington in Kansas City. Her electroacoustic piece "Insects" was featured at the 2009 FEASt Festival in Florida, the 2009 Beauty, Horror and Silence Festival in Florida, and the 2010 SEAMUS National Conference in St. Cloud, Minnesota. She is the composer in residence of the Immaculata Symphony Orchestra, who premiered her Jack and the Beanstalk suite for orchestra and youth choir at their annual youth concert in February 2010.
Melissa was awarded an Associate Diploma in viola performance from the Australian Music Examinations Board at age 16. She has a Bachelor of Music (summa cum laude, Pi Kappa Lambda) from West Chester University, where she was a recipient of the Harry Wilkinson Music Theory Scholarship, the Charles S. and Margherita Gangemi Memorial Scholarship for excellence in music theory and composition, and the Janice Weir Etshied '50 Scholarship for academic excellence. She is currently undertaking doctoral studies in composition at the University of Pennsylvania on a Benjamin Franklin Fellowship.
More information about Melissa can be found at www.melissadunphy.com.
[The Gonzales Cantata] is honestly, probably the coolest thing you've ever seen on this show. I know. I'm totally freaking out about it ... I spent all day obsessing about this, and watching clips of it online, and listening to the music, and I have to tell you, in my opinion, it is both great and kind of moving ... this is so cool, I could not contain myself.
-- Rachel Maddow, The Rachel Maddow Show
The final work of the evening was “Tesla’s Pigeon,” a new song cycle by the endlessly inventive Dunphy, whose smash-hit full-length oratorio The Gonzales Cantata rocked the 2009 Fringe Festival.
-- Penn Gazette
Make Major Moves got the Fringe veteran - Melissa presented her concert opera “The Gonzales Cantata” at Fringe 2009 -on the telephone to talk about Kanye West, the decline of the Philly Orchestra, the new classical scene, her rock band Up Your Cherry, and how Nikola Tesla fell in love with a bird.
-- Philadelphia Weekly: Make Major Moves
A newly commissioned work by Melissa Dunphy followed: “What do you think I fought for at Omaha Beach?” Dunphy’s music was exceptional, with supple lines effectively depicting the words of a veteran, and acerbic harmonies specifically setting the text “I’ve seen so much, so much blood and guts.”
-- Kansas City Star
Australian-born Melissa has already achieved a level of success and recognition on a national level, including a spot on The Rachel Maddow Show for another large choral work, The Gonzales Cantata.
-- KCMETROPOLIS.org
Macbeth shows Khan's willingness to experiment, focusing on Macbeth and his wife in a 90-minute paring driven by Melissa Dunphy's beautifully haunting music.
-- Philadelphia Citypaper
Simon Carrington gave his reasoning behind selecting Dunphy's work as the winner. "There were plenty of excellent pieces in the sweet-sounding modern idiom which SCCS would make very beautiful, but the strongest (and most individual) piece was Melissa Dunphy's What do you think I fought for at Omaha Beach? - a bold and highly effective setting of a thought-provoking text.
-- KCMETROPOLIS.org
Composer Melissa Dunphy has provided a soundscape for an assortment of exotic instruments played onstage: a Chinese ehru, Tibetan ringing bowls, and a varity of drums and gongs. The result not only heightens the atmosphere of the play, but in fact signals how we're supposed to feel about the action.
-- Philadelphia Inquirer
A few days before starting her doctoral studies at Penn, Melissa Dunphy Gr’14 woke up to discover that she was a celebrity. The torrent of interviews and articles wasn’t confined to the arts and culture sections, either. Instead, the 29-year-old composer’s name was popping up on everything from the Huffington Post to Fox News.
-- The Pennsylvania Gazette
Fellow graduate student Thomas Patteson, who attended one of the performances, observes, “The Gonzales Cantata is effective both as a work of art—the music is exquisite—and as mordant political commentary.”
-- University of Pennsylvania SAS Frontiers
...confident, charged composition and orchestration, [with] pragmatic inventiveness in the cantata's construction, [and] frequent wittiness and use of irony.
-- J's Theater
Her Gonzales Cantata - more PDQ Bach than Nixon in China - uses Handel's formality and symmetry as a starting point, humorously colliding with Gonzales' anything-but-symmetrical train of thought, quoted from the 2007 Senate Judiciary Committee hearings
-- The Philadelphia Inquirer
Take heed, folks, not only should you go see this work – you should examine how this 29-year-old graduate student has received more press about her cantata than most major composers do when they win the Pulitzer Prize
-- Sequenza21
Lovely conductor/composer Melissa Dunphy has seamlessly re-created former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’ 2007 judiciary hearings as an opera, with epic results.
-- CityPaper (Philadelphia)
Dunphy is just as passionate about politics as she is about the arts. She veers away from musical theory to cheer on Barney Frank for his blunt comments at a recent health care town hall. But she does not espouse any political bent in the opera.
-- Edge Philadelphia
The career path of Alberto Gonzales provides perfect material for an opera in the tradition of George Frederick Handel. It has its earnest moments, flashes of heroism (involving Gonzales’s victims, of course, not the protagonist), and yet there is a steady undercurrent of opera buffa.
-- Harper's Magazine
Every word in composer Melissa Dunphy's 40-minute choral production comes from Gonzales' Senate testimony. They never sounded more beautiful (Except maybe to the ears of relieved Team Bush members back in the White House) than when they are sung, especially by this bunch.
-- The Chicago Tribune
And if congressional hearings are your idea of a good time - aren't they all - a theater in Philadelphia has a night on the town for you.
-- Fox News
[The Gonzales Cantata] is honestly, probably the coolest thing you've ever seen on this show. I know. I'm totally freaking out about it ... I spent all day obsessing about this, and watching clips of it online, and listening to the music, and I have to tell you, in my opinion, it is both great and kind of moving ... this is so cool, I could not contain myself.
-- The Rachel Maddow Show - MSNBC
I’ve had both Republicans and Democrats come to the show and remark that it really wasn’t about party politics. It’s about a man who made some mistakes and is facing the music. It’s also an exploration of how a man could so brazenly politicize the Department of Justice without really standing up for the reasons he went into politics in the first place.
-- The Wall Street Journal law blog
Melissa Dunphy's setting of Luke Stromberg's Black Thunder reflects the extravagance and paranoia of young love and its powerful ending.
-- WRTI Critic-At-Large Podcast
In the second half, Luke Stromberg's marvelous poem "Black Thunder," about the aftereffects of drink, was given an appropriately bluesy haze by Melissa Dunphy.
-- Philadelphia Inquirer
Ambient music played onstage by violinist Melissa Dunphy also helps to create a dreamlike atmosphere.
-- Patriot-News
Even the background players in this production are noteworthy: the raucous fairies double as musicians and singers, playing rustic but graceful tunes by Melissa Dunphy
-- Patriot-News
