Stacy Garrop’s music is centered on dramatic and lyrical storytelling. She is the first Emerging Opera Composer of Chicago Opera Theater’s new Vanguard Initiative for 2018-2020, during which she has composed two chamber operas with Chicago librettist Jerre Dye. She recently completed a 3-year composer-in-residence position with the Champaign-Urbana Symphony Orchestra, funded by New Music USA and the League of American Orchestras. During the residence, she had multiple works performed with the Champaign-Urbana Symphony Orchestra, including Terra Nostra (her evening-length oratorio about our planet) while running several outreach programs for organizations and schools throughout the Champaign-Urbana region, including the Education Justice Project at the Danville Correctional Center (a medium-security men’s prison) and the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute for adults.
Garrop has received numerous awards and grants including an Arts and Letters Award in Music from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Barlow Prize, Fromm Music Foundation Grant, three Barlow Endowment commissions, Detroit Symphony Orchestra’s Elaine Lebenbom Memorial Award, Raymond and Beverly Sackler Music Composition Prize, and competitions sponsored by the Civic Orchestra of Chicago, Omaha Symphony, New England Philharmonic, Boston Choral Ensemble, Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble, and the Utah Arts Festival. She has participated in reading session programs sponsored by the American Composers Orchestra and Minnesota Orchestra (the Composers Institute). Her catalog covers a wide range, with works for orchestra, opera, oratorio, wind ensemble, choir, art song, and various sized chamber ensembles (including string quartet, piano trio, and saxophone).
She has previously served as composer-in-residence with the Albany Symphony and Skaneateles Festival, as well as on the faculty of the Fresh Inc Festival (2012-2017). After teaching composition and orchestration full-time at Roosevelt University from 2000 to 2016, she stepped down from her position to become a freelance composer. Garrop earned degrees in music composition at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor (B.M.), University of Chicago (M.A.), and Indiana University-Bloomington (D.M.).
Stacy Garrop
Studios
Sprague-Smith
Stacy Garrop worked in the Sprague-Smith studio.
In January of 1976, the original Sprague-Smith Studio — built in 1915–1916 and funded by music students of Mrs. Charles Sprague-Smith of the Veltin School — was destroyed by fire. Redesigned by William Gnade, Sr., a Peterborough builder, the fieldstone structure was rebuilt the same year from the foundation up, reusing the original fieldstone. A few…