BIOGRAPHY

Scott Ordway (b. 1984, California) is an American composer, performer, and multimedia artist whose work spans classical and electronic 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 at festivals across the US, Europe, and Asia.

Ordway began his musical life as a songwriter, singer, and guitarist in indie and post-hardcore bands, recording and touring in California and the Pacific Northwest. That experience still shapes how he works: he writes his own texts, makes the video and photography that accompany his music, and performs on synthesizers, both alongside the ensembles he writes for and through Public Ceremony, his live solo show.

Raised in Northern California, Ordway makes work that engages with landscape, ecology, and memory, especially the landscapes of the American West. Recent projects include The End of Rain, a multimedia symphony for Roomful of Teeth and the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music about wildfire and drought in the American West; The Architecture of Trees for cellist Maya Fridman and the Dutch vocal ensemble Storm in a Jar, presented at the Gaudeamus and Oranjewoud Festivals; Squares, a synthesizer score for BalletX and choreographer Matthew Neenan; and Expanse of My Soul, a song cycle created with Grammy-winning mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke from fragments of her personal letters, premiered at Stanford Live and Wigmore Hall. In 2027, Ordway will premiere The History of Water, an oratorio for chamber choir, synthesizers, and projected photography co-commissioned by Roots in the Sky, The Crossing, Stare at the Sun, and Volti.

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; the Tucson Symphony; vocal ensembles Roomful of Teeth, Lorelei, and The Thirteen; and soloists including Sasha Cooke, Maya Fridman, Arlen Hlusko, Ruda Lee, Min Kwon, and Anyango Yarbo-Davenport. His chamber music collaborators include SOLI Chamber Ensemble, the Tanglewood New Fromm Players, Norrbotten NEO (Sweden), and the Arneis, Jasper, Momenta, and Daedalus String Quartets.

Ordway has released four critically-acclaimed solo albums on the Acis label, and his music appears on the Naxos, Delos, New Focus, Bright Shiny Things, and TRPTK labels. His most recent release is North Woods with Lorelei Ensemble (2025); forthcoming recordings include The Architecture of Trees on TRPTK, Letters to My Daughters with cellist Josh Halpern, and a string quartet portrait album with the Arneis Quartet. As a photographer, he has presented solo exhibitions at the Kunstverein Familie Montez in Frankfurt am Main and at Boston's Laconia Gallery.

His work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, NewMusicUSA, ASCAP, American Composers Forum, the American Composers Orchestra, the Alice M. Ditson Fund of Columbia University, and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. He was a finalist for Opus Klassik's Composer of the Year and was part of a multidisciplinary team that won the Goodmesh Concours Grand Prize for Interdisciplinary Art (The Hague). Ordway is a current Fellow at Oregon State University's Patricia Valian Reser Center for the Creative Arts, was a Composers & the Voice Fellow with American Opera Projects, and was a Distinguished Fellow at the Hambidge Center for Creative Arts & Sciences. He has held residencies at Copland House, the Visby International Centre for Composers (Sweden), Brush Creek, and Willapa Bay AiR. He is 2026–27 Composer-in-Residence with SOLI Chamber Ensemble and has held the same role at the Cabrillo, Newburyport, and Carolina Chamber Music Festivals.

Ordway is Associate Professor of Music and Head of Composition at the Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University. He was 2025–26 Guest Artist at Stanford University and Visiting Scholar at its Bill Lane Center for the American West, and joins the faculty of the Freie Universität Berlin International Summer University as a visiting artist in 2027. He previously taught at the Curtis Institute of Music and has held conducting posts with Juventas New Music Ensemble (Boston), Syzygy New Music Ensemble (New York) and the Eugene Contemporary Chamber Ensemble. Ordway studied at the University of Pennsylvania (PhD), the University of Oregon, the University of Puget Sound, the Freie Universität Berlin, and the Accademia Chigiana where his teachers included Samuel Adler, Azio Corghi, Robert Hutchinson, Robert Kyr, James Primosch, Jay Reise, Veljo Tormis, and Anna Weesner. He lives in Philadelphia.