Reinaldo Moya

credit: Arthur Moella

Reinaldo Moya’s (b. 1984) music has been performed in Germany, Colombia, Brazil, Australia, Argentina, Venezuela and throughout the U.S. by performers such as the New Jersey Symphony, the Juilliard Orchestra, the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela, the Da Capo Chamber Players, the Attacca Quartet, Zeitgeist, The St. Olaf Orchestra, as well as musicians from the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Minnesota Orchestra and the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, and Alarm Will Sound, among others. He is the recipient of the 2015 McKnight Composers Fellowship, the Van Lier Fellowship from Meet the Composer, and the Aaron Copland Award from the Copland House.

Reinaldo has been commissioned by the Minnesota Opera to write a new opera as part of Minnesota Opera’s initiative Project Opera. An adaptation of Will Weaver’s book Memory Boy, the opera has a libretto by Mark Campbell and was premiered in the spring of 2016. Excerpts from his opera Generalissimo have been performed at Symphony Space, and Weill Recital Hall in Carnegie Hall. He graduated from The Juilliard School with both Master’s and Doctorate degrees, under the tutelage of Samuel Adler and Robert Beaser. Reinaldo is Assistant Professor of Composition at Augsburg College in Minneapolis, and has served on the faculty at St. Olaf, and Macalester colleges in Minnesota.

Reinaldo writes:

I wrote Passacaglia for Orchestra at the request of my good friend William Harvey, the founder and director of Cultures in Harmony, an American cultural diplomacy organization that I am involved with. A passacaglia is a form in which the bass line remains constant, uniting many different variations that arise from it. In a world increasingly driven by misunderstanding, music can remind us of what we share: the fundamental desire to lead our lives in peace and with mutual respect. For its tenth anniversary in 2015, Cultures in Harmony traveled to some of the countries where we have worked in the past ten years to demonstrate these connections in a project inspired by the musical form of the passacaglia. Just as the variations of a passacaglia change while the bass line, also called the ‘ground’ remains the same, people from all over the world embody a variety of differences yet share common values and aspirations”

listen to an excerpt of Reinaldo’s Breathe: