UWRF presents Eve Beglarian for 60th Commissioned Composer Concert March 12

UW-River Falls presents Eve Beglarian for 60th Commissioned Composer Concert March 12

Feb. 27, 2026 – The University of Wisconsin-River Falls will welcome featured composer Eve Beglarian for the 60th Commissioned Composer concert on Thursday, March 12, at 7:30 p.m. in Abbott Concert Hall in Kleinpell Fine Arts, 420 E. Cascade Ave., River Falls. The concert is free and open to the public.

Beglarian will be on campus March 10-12 for a three-day residency working with faculty and students and sharing insights about her music. The public is also invited to a convocation March 12 at 11 a.m. in Abbott Concert Hall, where she will discuss her new composition, “Who is my neighbor.” 

According to the Los Angeles Times, composer and performer Eve Beglarian is a “humane, idealistic rebel and a musical sensualist.” She received the 2023 Arts and Letters Award for “a spectacular body of work that innovates and takes enormous risks,” the 2017 Alpert Award in the Arts and the 2015 Robert Rauschenberg Prize for innovation and experimentation. Her piece, “None More Than You,” appears on Roomful of Teeth’s album “Rough Magic,” which won the Grammy Award for Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance in 2024.

Beglarian’s current projects include a solo piano work imagining Emily Dickinson’s response to Ives’ “Concord Sonata” for pianist Donald Berman; a piece about Alaskan light for the 2025 Wild Shore Festival; a queer reimagining of Guillaume de Machaut’s “Le Voir Dit;” and a work for 24 basses in a grove of trees, written for Robert Black and friends, with a recording forthcoming on Cantaloupe Music. Since 2001, she has created “A Book of Days,” described by the Los Angeles Times as “a grand and gradually manifesting work in progress.” In 2009, after kayaking and bicycling the Mississippi River, Beglarian transformed the journey into a song cycle praised by the New York Times for its “sophisticated rusticity.”

Beglarian’s music has been commissioned and performed by ensembles including the Los Angeles Master Chorale, American Composers Orchestra, Bang on a Can All-Stars, Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, California EAR Unit, Orchestra of St. Luke’s, loadbang, Newspeak, and Ekmeles, as well as performers such as Maya Beiser, Lara Downes, Lucy Dhegrae and Thomas Feng.

In music theater, she has written for Mabou Mines productions including “Dollhouse,” “Animal Magnetism,” “Ecco Porco,” “Choephorai” and “Shalom Shanghai” (directed by Lee Breuer), as well as “Forgiveness” with Chen Shi-Zheng and Akira Matsui and the China National Beijing Opera Theater’s production of “The Bacchae.” She has collaborated widely with choreographers and visual artists, and her performance projects include “Brim,” “Songs from a Book of Days,” “The Story of B,” “Open Secrets,” “Hildegurls’ Ordo Virtutum,” “twisted tutu” and “typOpera.”

Beglarian earned her undergraduate degree at Princeton University and a master’s degree from Columbia University, studying with Milton Babbitt, J.K. Randall and privately with Jacques-Louis Monod. Recordings of her music are available on ECM, Koch, New World, Cantaloupe, Innova, Naxos, Kill Rock Stars, CDBaby, and Bandcamp.

Photo: Eve Beglarian. Contributed photo/Georgia Nerheim.