COMMISSIONED COMPOSER COMPETITION
CHAIRPERSON: ESMA PASIC-FILIPOVIC (composercommission@njmta.com)
Every year, the NJMTA commissions a living composer to create original compositions for piano students to learn and perform in a competition. A performance of these pieces by the winners, chosen by the composer, is held in November at the NJMTA Conference to promote interest in new music by living composers.
2025 WINNERS LIST
(Stay tuned for details!)
COMPETITION DATE: TBA
REGISTRATION DEADLINE: TBA
PERFORMANCE DATE: TBA
2026 COMMISSIONED COMPOSER is. . .
MATTHEW LIU
Hailed for his "charm and impeccable musical instincts", Matthew Liu is an NYC-based composer/lyricist, singer, actor, and musician/music director with two degrees from The Juilliard School. Having just come off an acclaimed run as The Narrator in Falling Out at Under St. Marks Theatre, Matthew has had musical and theatrical premieres at such venues as Isaac Stern Auditorium at Carnegie Hall, David Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center and National Sawdust and internationally in Taiwan, Russia and Hungary on tour with IMPACT. He plays 10 instruments and is a proud member of the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theater Writing Advanced Workshop as well as a National YoungArts Foundation winner (Music Composition). Acting highlights include the lead roles of Song Liling in M. Butterfly (Woodstock Playhouse) and Robert Lyons in Upside Down (AMT Theatre), Bandleader Wallace Hartley and Third Officer Herbert Pitman in Titanic (Fireside Theatre), The Fiddler in Fiddler on the Roof (Fireside Theatre), Stephen Sondheim’s You’re Gonna Love Tomorrow (Theater 2020) and the villain Cassie in the film series From Kitchen To Throne. Music Directing: Sound of the Silk Road in Beijing, Ankang and Xi’an (Nederlander Worldwide Entertainment), Bastard Jones (the cell theatre), Into the Woods and Mother Courage (The Juilliard School) and Len Cariou and Stephen Bogardus in Dutch Master (York Theater Company). You can also hear Matthew’s arrangements on Fever’s Candlelight Concerts and Nickelodeon. So much love to all family, friends and mentors – couldn’t have done it without you!
youtube.com/c/MatthewLiu Insta/TikTok: @mattliuthings
COMMISSIONED Repertoire
(samples will be available soon!)
Elementary: Four Four Oh!
Intermediate: To Manhattan
Advanced: Tribute
Chamber: Rhapsody (Violin/Piano, opt. Viola or Cello instead of violin)
Some words from the composer:
"As a proud NJ native, I spent my childhood in the NJMTA program and am now so honored to have been commissioned by this wonderful group of teachers. These four pieces reflect my years growing up in New Jersey, each capturing a different memory and stage of musical life. With these works, I invite performers to dive in and be more than musicians: to become storytellers and perhaps even actors as well.
The Elementary piece, Four Four Oh!, is a quaint musical scene inspired by my early days practicing the piano, which lived in the same room as my wooden train toys. The child is bored practicing, frequently going back and forth between piano and toy trains...until Mom comes in!
The Intermediate piece, To Manhattan, captures my weekly NJ Transit 139 bus ride from Union Hill to Manhattan for Juilliard Precollege and music lessons, family visits, or shows—pulsing with hope and excitement for an adventure in the big city, sometimes rocked to sleep by the bus before an abrupt awakening upon arrival.
The Advanced piece, Tribute, is a virtuosic and pianistic expression of gratitude I have for all who supported and believed in me, One should play this piece with great emotion and generosity.
The Chamber music piece, Rhapsody, is an intimate duet of youthful longing, shaped by a distant boardwalk seaside memory and unfolding in a harmonically expressive and rhythmically free musical language. (For the duet, the original version is violin and piano but I'd like to keep it open to viola and cello. If anyone shows interest in those, I'd be happy to make those versions of the viola and/opr cello parts.)
In respect of copyright laws for our CCC composers, teachers should purchase separate copies for each student, or ask the parents to order the music from NJMTA themselves. Thank you for joining us in the effort to support our composers.
By participating in any NJMTA event, parents give permission to the New Jersey Music Teachers Association(NJMTA) to use photographs or videos of your child taken by NJMTA representative, with appropriate captions, in NJMTA publications, on the NJMTA website, social media and/or in the local newspapers. If you do not wish NJMTA to use your child’s photos/videos in any way, kindly notify the chairperson of the event in which your child is participating.
2025: PHILIP ORR
Philip Orr (b. 1956) is a composer of classical, jazz, and popular music: concert works, liturgical works, dramatic underscoring, incidental music, salon/occasional music, jazz tunes, and hymn tunes; 2- to 20-minute works for choir(s), public singing, solo voice, wind ensemble, concert band, chamber groups, and solo keyboard. He is the recipient of several ASCAPlus awards and a NJ State Council on the Arts fellowship. Guided by a precocious ear through the broad musical tastes of his parents, Orr was already an adept whistler and boy soprano at 7 when he began studies in piano, oboe, and theory at the Neighborhood Music School in New Haven. Before finishing high school, he also acquired facility on bassoon, recorders, saxophones, double bass, and cornet. He was a private student of pioneering jazz pedagogue, John Mehegan; performed in college and community theater pits; and contributed original works, arrangements, piano, and brass work to the University of Bridgeport Jazz Ensemble under Neil Slater.
In 1974, Orr began touring as keyboardist and occasional arranger for Gene Hull, Vic Damone, Diane Scanlon, Billy Fellows, and Sandler & Young. A year of composition study at Manhattan School of Music (Giampaolo Bracali) and freelancing in metro New York filled in around tours. In the late 1970s his interests expanded to include sacred music, adding duties as music director and resident composer for churches in Connecticut and New York to a mix of keyboard, brass, and arranger/copyist work. This continued in force until 1993 when he matriculated at Westminster Choir College for Sacred Music/Organ (Eugene Roan) and Composition (Stefan Young). Since completing his degrees, Orr has navigated a variety of musical paths simultaneously: faculty member at Rider University/Westminster Choir College (retired 2023); music publisher at Orrganized Sound Music Publishing; Director of Music at Calvary Baptist Church in Hopewell, NJ; and freelance keyboardist in jazz, pop, musical theater, and cabaret settings, with occasional forays into classical recital repertoire.
As a keyboardist, Orr has extensive live performance and recording experience involving piano, synthesizer, mellophone, flugelhorn, recorders, and ‘puccolo’ (mouth whistling), and incidentally with major U.S. orchestras and conductors as a baritone chorister with the Westminster Symphonic Choir. He has featured on more than a dozen album-length releases, with original compositions and arrangements represented on another three. He currently collaborates with composer Steve Hiltner as part of the Sustainable Jazz Duo; with his jazz trio, Phil Orr & More; and in the improvised comedy cabaret, “Off the Top!” with Jason Kravits. Read more at philiporrmusician.com/orr-what/
COMMISSIONED Repertoire
Elementary - Daydream Number 8
Intermediate - Wanna Dance?
Advanced - The Way of Truth, the Way of Freedom
Chamber ensemble - Rumination (Cello/Piano Duet)
2024: Carmen Aurora Mateiescu
Carmen Aurora Mateiescu is a Romanian-American composer, theorist, ethnomusicologist, and educator. Dr. Mateiescu holds a MM from the University of Music Bucharest and a PhD in composition and theory from Rutgers University. She started to study piano and music theory at a young age. Her three piano teachers, from first grade to graduate school – Marta Paladi, Stefania Cumpata and Mariana Soimaru – had been pupils of “Miss Maestra Florica Musicescu” who also trained the legendary pianist Dinu Lipatti. The distinctive feature of their teaching was the emphasis on expression and tone quality.
In Romania Mateiescu was a music teacher for grades 1-12 then an ethnomusicologist with the “Constantin Brailoiu Folklore Institute.” She carried out a great number of field recordings, transcribed hundreds of songs and dance melodies, studied the variation field of the lyric song, co-authored the inaugural LP The Traditional Folk Music Band of the Romanian National Collection of Folklore, and contributed substantially to the first Romanian Dictionary of Musical Terms.
In the US, Dr. Mateiescu has been teaching composition, theory, ethnomusicology, and piano at Rutgers University, Westminster Choir College of Rider University, Westminster Conservatory of Music, and privately. She also organized and presented concerts of early music and Romanian traditional music at venues in Princeton, New York, and Washington DC. As a member of the New Jersey Music Teachers Association, Carmen Mateiescu oversaw the student composer competition for many years.
Mateiescu’s compositions – for piano, voice and piano, chamber ensembles, as well as the fairy tale-opera Youth without Age and Life without Death based on a Romanian traditional tale, are all imbued with melodic, rhythmic, and ornamental structures derived from the music of the oral tradition of the cultures surrounding the Mediterranean Sea – Romania, the Balkans, Eastern Mediterranean, and Northern Africa.
COMMISSIONED Repertoire
Elementary - Cheerful Chirping Chicks
Intermediate - The Enchanted Meadow
Advanced - Cumulonimbus Rondo
Chamber music - The Flowery Mountain (VIolin/Piano or Piano Four Hands, the same music)