Justin Ralls – Composer / Conductor
Justin Ralls, composer and conductor, hails from the Pacific Northwest and is inspired by the beauty of the natural world and our ‘elemental imagination.’ Ralls has conducted his works at the Hydansaal in Eisenstadt, Austria, the Lucca International Youth Orchestra Festival in Albano Terme, Italy, Oregon Bach Festival, Fairbanks Summer Arts Festival, Britt Festival at Crater Lake National Park, the Newman Scoring Stage at 2oth Century Fox Studios in Los Angeles, Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall in Portland, as well as venues in Salzburg, Rome, Portland, Fairbanks, Boston, San Francisco and beyond. Ralls’ work has been described as “a beautifully textured, lush evocation of John Muir’s Yosemite that was full of color and light” (Daily Gazette, NY), “a gifted melodist…a beautiful blend of natural and human-made music” (Artslandia), and “a whirlwind of thick orchestral textures…definitely establishing his own voice…” (SF Examiner). Ralls’ Tree Ride won the 2013 Highsmith Award for orchestra and received Special Distinction in the 2014 ASCAP Rudolf Nissim Prize as well as winning Third Place in the 2017-18 American Prize. Tree Ride was featured on the 2014 Fairbanks Summer Arts Festival in Fairbanks, Alaska conducted by Robert Franz. Tree Ride was also featured on Albany Symphony’s 2015 Composer-to-Center-Stage as well as their 2017 American Music Festival, conducted by David Alan Miller. John Adams spoke of Tree Ride as “impressive…showing a mastery of orchestral technique,” also stating “your analogy to natural forces was done very well, your thunderstorm basically better than the Pastoral.”
J attends the Metropolitan Opera. Photo by Anne Polyakov.
Justin Ralls conducting Nu Nah-Hup: Sacajawea’s Story with Hovia Edwards, Native American Flute.
Ralls’ collaborations include a variety of soloists and ensembles including Albany Symphony (NY), Third Angle Ensemble, Hawai’i Symphony Orchestra, Roomful of Teeth, Fear No Music, Eugene Opera, Juventas New Music Ensemble, American Wild Ensemble, Opera Theater Oregon, San Francisco Conservatory Orchestra, Esteli Gomez, Molly Barth, Robert Ainsley, Katherine Goforth, Shoshone-Bannock flutist Hovia Edwards, Hunter Noack’s In a Landscape series and more. As a composer he explores an aesthetic plurality and eclecticism encompassing many styles including film music, natural soundscapes, improvisation, electronics, vocal, chamber, jazz, folk and orchestral forces. Ralls was the regional winner of Third Angle Ensemble’s inaugural 2012 New Ideas in Music Competition, conducting his winning work, Anthrophony, on two of the groups New Ideas in Music Concerts. In July, 2012 he participated in the inaugural Composing in the Wilderness workshop in Denali National Park, composing a piece while in the Denali wilderness for the Fairbanks Summer Arts Festival. As a conductor he has led several premieres of contemporary works as well as collaborating with community and professional ensembles such as Riverside Chamber Orchestra, Third Angle New Music Ensemble, Metropolitan Youth Symphony, and professional musicians at the Newman Fox Scoring Stage at 20th Century Fox. As conductor and Artistic Director of Opera Theater Oregon he has led the NW premieres of Academy Award winning composer Rachel Portman’s The Little Prince, Michael Lanci’s Songs for Joe Hill and Grammy Award winning composer Michael Daugherty’s This Land Sings, In collaboration with Filmusik, which combines live foley, voice acting, and music, Ralls conducted two original live film scores including Gamera vs. Zigra - performed for over a thousand people in a free concert in Portland’s Sewallcrest Park – and Turkish Rambo, conducting six shows at Portland’s historic Hollywood Theater. He steadfastly believes in the transformative and communal power of music to bring ideas and communities together, whether between human communities or between humans and the natural world. In 2017 Opera Theater Oregon produced the world premiere of Ralls’ chamber opera, Two Yosemites: An Environmental Opera, setting the 1903 meeting of John Muir and Theodore Roosevelt, featuring tenor Aaron Short and baritone Nicholas Meyer – “Ralls took this thematic coloring to the next level, in the finest operatic tradition,” (Oregon Arts Watch). In 2018 Ralls received a commission from pianist Hunter Noack’s In a Landscape series of outdoor solo piano concerts in wild spaces and public lands throughout Oregon. Throughout the pandemic Ralls continued collaborations with Portland Opera Resident Artist, Camille Sherman, composing and arranging songs for clarinet and mezzo-soprano, including the popular 1919 song The World is Waiting for the Sunrise and Opera Theater Oregon’s Dream Within A Dream episode series. Eugene Opera premiered Ralls’ Three Songs on their “Songs of Quarantine” virtual series in Spring, 2021. Ralls’ work Olmsted 200: Theme and Variations commemorated the 200th anniversary of landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted’s birth, and was commissioned and performed by Landscape Composers Network, Juventas New Music Ensemble, American Wild Ensemble, and Michigan Technical University in 2022.
An exciting current project in development, Nu-Nah-Hup: Sacajawea’s Story, is an opera project collaboration with Rose Ann Abrahamson (Agai-Dika/Lemhi-Shoshone culture bearer and great-great-grandniece of Sacajawea) portraying the Indigenous perspective of her ancestor, Sacajawea, the Shoshone woman who accompanied the Lewis and Clark Expedition. This project also entails language and culture preservation in an interdisciplinary collaboration with the Shoshoni Language Project at the University of Utah, receiving a 2022 award from the Native Voices Endowment of Endangered Language Fund at Yale University. Upcoming projects include original scores for the environmental short film, In Search of the Stars collaborating with award-winning filmmaker, Sriram Murali.
Photo by Theodore Sweeney
Ralls conducting ‘The Little Prince’ at Portland’s Winningstad Theatre
Ralls presenting pre-concert talk at OTO’s 2017 production of “Two Yosemites: An Environmental Opera”
Ralls’ education includes a Bachelor of Music in Composition from The Boston Conservatory where he studied with Dalit Warshaw, Andy Vores, and Jan Swafford; a Master of Music from the San Francisco Conservatory under the tutelage of Dan Becker and David Conte. In March, 2020 he successfully defended his Ph.D. in Music Composition at the University of Oregon where he has taught composition as well as studying with composers Robert Kyr, David Crumb and electronic music with Jeffrey Stolet, with additional research in Nature, New Media, and Indigenous Thought. His doctoral dissertation, a three-act eco-fairy tale opera Song of the Most Beautiful Bird of the Forest, is a synthesis of dance, music, and story, influenced by scholarship in eco-musicology, soundscape ecology, and intercultural collaboration with Ghanaian Master drummer and dancer, Dr. Habib Iddrisu. In the Spring of 2020 Ralls taught composition and musicianship at Linfield University as an Adjunct Professor of Music. Ralls enjoys the outdoors, hiking, backpacking, birdwatching and reading the works of John Muir and Joseph Campbell.
250 word bio:
Justin Ralls, internationally recognized and award-winning composer, is inspired by the natural world: “a gifted melodist…a beautiful blend of natural and human-made music” (Artslandia), “impressive…showing a mastery of orchestral technique” (composer, John Adams), “definitely establishing his own voice” (SF Examiner). Ralls’ music engages ecologically and socially relevant themes in opera, orchestral, chamber, solo works, film music, and intercultural collaborations. Ralls’ works have been performed by a variety of soloists and ensembles including Albany Symphony (NY), Third Angle Ensemble, Hawai’i Symphony Orchestra, Roomful of Teeth, Fear No Music, Eugene Opera, Jarring Sounds, International Orange Chorale, San Francisco Conservatory Orchestra and more. Ralls’ Tree Ride won the 2013 Highsmith Award for orchestra and received Special Distinction in the 2014 ASCAP Rudolf Nissim Prize. Tree Ride was also featured on Albany Symphony’s 2015 Composer-to-Center-Stage as well as their 2017 American Music Festival, conducted by David Alan Miller. As conductor and Artistic Director of Opera Theater Oregon he has led the NW premieres of Academy Award winning composer Rachel Portman’s The Little Prince, Grammy Award winning composer Michael Daugherty’s This Land Sings, collaborating with national radio personality Thom Hartmann. An exciting current project, Nu-Nah-Hup: Sacajawea’s Story, is an opera project collaboration with Rose Ann Abrahamson (Agai-Dika/Lemhi-Shoshone culture bearer and great-great-grandniece of Sacajawea) portraying the Indigenous perspective of her ancestor, Sacajawea, the Shoshone woman who accompanied the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Recent projects include an original score to documentary film, In Search of the Stars by award-winning filmmaker, Sriram Murali. He holds a Ph.D. in Music Composition, specializing in Nature, New Music, and Indigenous Thought.
