About

Tiffany M. Skidmore is an American composer and performer based in Buffalo, NY where she is currently Visiting Associate Professor of Music Composition at the University at Buffalo (SUNY), holding the Birge Cary Chair in Music Composition from 2023-2024. In January 2025, she will begin a residency at CIRMMT (the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music Media and Technology) as a Visiting Professor at McGill University. She holds degrees in Music Composition and Vocal Performance from Gonzaga University, Eastern Washington University, and the University of Minnesota, where she studied with James Dillon and theorist Michael Cherlin, followed by post-doctoral studies with Chaya Czernowin. Her chamber, choral, and orchestral work has been interpreted by acclaimed experimental music specialists throughout the United States and Europe, including TAK Ensemble, loadbang, andPlay, Fonema Consort, Ensemble Dal Niente, Duo Gelland, and many others. She is a Schubert Club Award Winner and was a 2018 McKnight Composer Fellow, a John Duffy Institute for New Opera Fellow, and the 2018-19 Zeitgeist New Music Ensemble Composer-in-Residence. She is Co-Founder, Executive Director, and Co-Artistic Director of the Twin Cities-based 113 Composers Collective, an organization that produces concerts, festivals, and guest artist residencies throughout the world.

Soprano Nina Dante writes that “Tiffany Skidmore’s music brings to mind Sciarrino’s description of his own music: hearing it is like watching a volcano erupt from afar. While Skidmore’s music burns its own path outside of Sciarrino’s aesthetic, the description holds true. Her music often features slow moving textures dotted with energetic events (imagine a constellation moving across the sky over the course of the year, and interjecting shooting stars), a starry sound world, coldly emotional content, and a mix of musical abstraction with direct theatrical/conceptual content. For these reasons, like reading a myth of ancient times, we experience the drama of her works from a distance.”

As a performer, Skidmore has sung professionally with the Spokane and Coeur d’Alene Opera companies, Spokane Symphony Chorale, the Minnesota Chorale, the Contemporary Music Workshop, Hymnos Vocal Ensemble, the Gregorian Singers, the 113 Composers Collective, and as a free-lance soloist, primarily performing early and experimental music.

”One senses in her compositional work an open mind combined with a keen ear which can manifest in the most surprising of results.”
—James Dillon, composer

“I had the fortune of attending one of the performances and was struck by the intensity, detail, a depth of her sound world. Her ability to suspend and animate time is completely captivating.”

—William J. Lackey, American Composers Forum Vice President of Programs

“The Night of Enitharmon’s Joy II demonstrates the composer’s interest in using liminal instrumental techniques in pursuit of a unique sound world which is at once both subtle and strange and chillingly expressive. We are particularly interested in her capacity to create remarkable tension in her music.”

— Calliope Duo (Shannon Wettstein Sadler, piano, and Elizabeth McNutt, flute)

Left to Right: Kyle Hutchins, Tiffany M. Skidmore, Cecilia Gelland, Alex Richards,
and Martin Gelland, post-performance at the 2018 Darmstädter Ferienkurse.