Scott Ordway (b. 1984, California) is an American composer and multimedia artist whose widely acclaimed work spans music, text, photography, and film. His compositions have been described as “exquisite” (New York Times), “hypnotic” (BBC), and “a marvel” (Philadelphia Inquirer), and have been presented at Carnegie Hall, Wigmore Hall, Lincoln Center, Stanford Live, and major festivals in the US, Europe, and Asia.
Ordway’s work explores the relationship between slowness, stillness, and emotional intensity. Rooted in the classical tradition but radically open in form and tone, his compositions fuse text, sound, image, and memory to evoke a sense of longing, loss, and connection—especially to the natural world and to one another. Influenced by artists of stillness and scale—from Gustav Mahler to Hiroshi Sugimoto, and shaped by the emotional directness of underground indie and post-hardcore music—his work privileges duration and resonance over virtuosity or display.
Raised in Northern California, Ordway draws on the landscapes of the American West—their light, silence, and spiritual vastness—as a continuous source of artistic inspiration. Recent projects include The End of Rain, a multimedia oratorio for Roomful of Teeth and the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music confronting wildfire and drought in the Western U.S.; North Woods, a choral meditation on climate memory and our spiritual connection to nature for the Lorelei Ensemble; and The Clearing and the Forest, an immersive music-theater work for SOLI Chamber Ensemble rooted in ritual and exploring the relationship between landscape and migration. In 2024, he premiered Expanse of My Soul, a song cycle created in close collaboration with Grammy-winning mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke, setting fragments of her personal letters in a poetic exploration of love, memory, and the interior landscapes that shape us.
Hailed as “an American response to Sibelius” by the Boston Globe, his music has been performed by the Hong Kong, Buffalo, and Colorado Springs Philharmonics; Tucson Symphony; vocal ensembles Roomful of Teeth, Lorelei, and The Thirteen; and soloists including Sasha Cooke, Arlen Hlusko, Anyango Yarbo-Davenport, Sonja Tengblad, and Emily Marvosh, among many others. His chamber music collaborations include SOLI Chamber Ensemble, Tanglewood New Fromm Players, Norbotten NEO (Sweden), and the Jasper, Momenta, Daedalus, and Arneis String Quartets.
Ordway has released four critically-acclaimed solo recordings on the Acis label in addition to compilation appearances on Naxos, Bright Shiny Things, and TRPTK (Netherlands). In 2025, he will release recordings of two choral works: North Woods with the Lorelei Ensemble and Three Kalevala Songs with Rutgers University Kirkpatrick Choir. In addition to his work as a composer, Ordway is active as a writer, director, video artist, and photographer. He has presented solo photography exhibitions at the Kunstverein Familie Montez in Frankfurt am Main and at Boston’s Laconia Gallery.
His work is supported by numerous awards, fellowships, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, ASCAP, NewMusicUSA, the American Composers Orchestra, Alice M. Ditson Fund of Columbia University, American Music Center, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, American Composers Forum, and American Opera Projects, where he was a Fellow. A recipient of the Tuttle Creative Residency Award from Haverford College’s Hurford Center for the Arts and Humanities, he has also been invited for residencies at Copland House, Visby International Center for Composers (Sweden), Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts (WY), Willapa Bay AiR (WA), and Hambidge Center for Creative Arts & Sciences, where he was a Distinguished Fellow. He has served as Composer-in-Residence at the Cabrillo, Newburyport, and Carolina Chamber Music Festivals.
As a conductor, Ordway has held posts with the Syzygy New Music Ensemble (NYC) and Eugene Contemporary Chamber Ensemble (Oregon), and was Associate Conductor of the Juventas New Music Ensemble, an ensemble-in-residence at the Boston Conservatory. As a champion for the music of our time, he has presented more than 50 new works by young and emerging composers.
Ordway studied at the Universities of Pennsylvania, Oregon, and Puget Sound, the Freie Universität Berlin, and Accademia Chigiana where his teachers included Samuel Adler, Azio Corghi, Robert Hutchinson, Robert Kyr, James Primosch, Jay Reise, and Veljo Tormis. A voting member of the Recording Academy, Scott currently serves as Associate Professor of Music and Head of Composition at Rutgers University. He lives in Philadelphia where he taught previously at the Curtis Institute of Music.
