JoyEllen O’Brien discovered her drive towards composition at age twenty, with no prior musical training. Inspired by music's close marriage between structural thought and performing art, she shifted her studies from mathematics and theater to music. She rapidly soaked up sounds and ideas from the twentieth century during a year of study at Oxford. Two years later, the Sarah Lawrence College Orchestra premiered her first orchestral work, Essay No. 1: into our first world. The new music scene of New York City drew her from her native Massachusetts after the completion of her degree. She spent the next few years learning piano, pursuing a deeper musical appreciation and, of course, establishing a means of earning a living. During this time she profited much from study with composer Meyer Kupferman.
In 1999, North/South Consonance gave the first professional performance of an O’Brien work: Figments of Imagination for solo guitar. Figments was born out of a deep love for the fragile but expressive sound of the guitar. In her most recent works, Ms. O’Brien has been fascinated by the expressive potential of the concise. Just completed are minute ideas - a collection of five self-contained vignettes for clarinet and piano, each about one minute long - and Fanfaronade - a fast-paced orchestra piece of less than five minutes.
Ms. O’Brien’s activities in the new music community include private teaching, music copying and serving on grants panels. Currently, she is the general manager for the independent publisher and record label Soundspells Productions. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, Tom.