Contact email: spencer@spencerarias.com

Biography: Spencer Arias (b.1990) is a composer and performer based in East Lansing, Michigan who creates highly evocative music oftentimes represented by lived experiences and social commentary. Having worked with Dancers, Musicians, Visual Artists, and Poets, he thoroughly enjoys collaboration, improvisation and community engagement. His work often reflects on social issues, in particular nature and climate change. He also enjoys experimenting in the kitchen, photography, nature, and too much Netflix. He is also the host of the new YouTube cooking show Cooking with Creatives, where he interviews musicians and other creatives while they cook food together. He has had performances throughout the US and Europe having been performed by musicians such as the JACK Quartet, The Columbus Symphony Woodwind Quintet, Quartetto Indaco, the Rogue Trio, The Lotus Trio, The New Thread Quartet, PRISM Saxophone, Quarte, and Nick Photinos. He has won numerous awards some of which include the Music Now Competition, The Jere Hutcherson Large Ensemble Competition, and the Most Inspirational Performance Art Award at the 2020 Michigan State University Social Justice Art Festival. He earned a B.M. in Composition at Arizona State and an M.M. in Composition at New York University. Previously he served as an Instructor of Composition at the Seattle Conservatory of Music  and is currently a Doctoral Student at Michigan State University and has studied primarily with David Biedenbender, Alexis Bacon, and Lyn Goeringer. Spencer currently is an Instructor of Music Theory at Western Michigan University.

List of works: https://www.spencerarias.com/portfolio

Recording: Colorful Clouds (2020)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yq7isIH-SSA&t=180s 

I love clouds. As children, we look up in the sky and imagine worlds that only exist in our imagination. Color is also something that I love, for nearly the same reason. As a composer, I don’t often get to explore visual color. Rather, we use the word color to represent different musical sounds and timbres. Performers are not often asked to think about visual color in this way, so I wanted to create a way for performers to explore color and recreate the experience of staring up at the clouds. They are responding, with their instrument, to what they see in the clouds and what they hear in the electronic portion, relating it to the shifts in color that occur over the course of the piece.

The score and parts for Colorful Clouds are available at USD 20 from here: https://www.justatheorypress.com/product/arias-colorful-clouds/28?cp=true&sa=false&sbp=false&q=true

Composer’s website: https://www.spencerarias.com/