ARTIST STATEMENT: I am most interested in the immediate expressiveness of harmony, color, and process. Growing up, I fell in love with the rich ambiguity of impressionism and the meditative and relentlessly developing processes of minimalism and the avant-garde. I love synthesizing these elements in my music. Each composition is new territory for me: a new puzzle and a new sonic world to explore.
BIO: Praised for her "individual and strong voice" (Colin Clarke, Fanfare Magazine), Natalie Draper explores character and evocative sound-worlds in her music. Recent works include "Three Meditations for Organ," written for Anne Laver, "Soliloquy," a solo guitar piece for Ken Meyer, "Until there is nothing left," a solo piano piece commissioned by Lior Willinger (this project was featured on I Care If You Listen), and "Music of Foghorns & Seabirds" for the Akropolis Reed Quintet. Her music has received honors and recognition--Timelapse Variations, whichwas recorded on the SNOtone label and is available for streaming on Spotify, garnered positive reviews from Lydia Woolever in Baltimore Magazine ("dissonant melodies that build into a unified spiral"), Tim Smith in TheBaltimore Sun (a "tense, darkly colorful churn"), and Mark Medwin in Fanfare Magazine ("...polyrhythm bolstering gorgeous pantonal harmonies and shards of chromatic counterpoint," while "...items burst forth, in a way that might make Mahler smile..."). In 2018, Draper remixed excerpts from Timelapse Variations for the background music of a short NASA film featuring the research of glaciologist Joe MacGregor. This video can be viewed in a variety of places, including Smithsonian Magazine. Her song cycle "O sea-starved, hungry sea," which was released on Danielle Buonaiuto's album "Marfa Songs" in August 2020, was praised by Phyllis Bryn-Julson, who notes that the music allows you to really "'see' the waves and desolate shores," with a final movement that is "simply gorgeous." Buonaiuto's album is available for purchase on Bandcamp. Draper has held residencies and fellowships at the Ucross Foundation, the Tanglewood Music Center, the I-Park Foundation, and Yaddo. She is an assistant professor in the music theory and composition department at the Setnor School of Music at Syracuse University.
You can read more about her in this interview with VAN Magazine.