Rain Worthington

“In my years of teaching general music as an Orff-Schulwerk music specialist for Pre-K through 6th grade elementary classes, I have never found "classical" music to be beyond the emotional range of my students – at any age. I believe that the real experience of music is about discovery and finding a sense of "ownership" of the process (whether as a musician performing or an audience member listening) and emotional identification. It would be so exciting to be able to share my music with youth orchestras. And, especially with regard to performing contemporary classical works, to share the sense of making history with the performance of a premiere!”

Biography

“There is a deep interiority to this music . . . a composer of considerable imagination, emotional expressiveness, and poetic sensibility.” – American Record Guide

Performances of Worthington’s compositions have spanned the globe from Brazil to Iceland, Cyprus to Korea, Italy to India. Her work takes “. . . ideas of American musical style to a new place – like a walk in a familiar, yet very different park” – Chamber Music.

Self-taught in composition, her catalog includes works for orchestra, chamber ensembles, duos, solos and miniatures. Her writing has been described in the IAWM Journal as “a fusion of styles—ancient, medieval sounds expressed via modality and open sonorities, modernist minimalist ostinato, and classical approaches to basic ideas—to capture components of the human experience.”

2020 performances of her orchestral works include Still Motion performed at Carnegie Hall February 2020 on the DCINY concert series and Yet Still Night at the TUTTI Festival at Denison University. Shredding Glass received its World Premiere in Brazil in June 2019. She was guest at Missouri State University 2016 and 2017 for MSU Symphony orchestral world premieres of Tracing a Dream and In Passages. Subsequent orchestral premieres of In Passages were presented in Italy and Brazil in 2018.

Worthington received a 2020 commission for a new violin/piano work from Baltimore Symphony violinist Audrey Wright. She has received an American Prize-Ernst Bacon Award, a Global Music Award and grants from Meet the Composer, ASCAP, American Music Center, NYFA, and American Composers Forum.

Since 2010, Navona Records has released Worthington’s chamber and orchestral music, with 2020 releases of two new works, Shadows of the Wind and Within Deep Currents. Her 2016 solo orchestral album “DREAM VAPORS” received wide critical acclaim.

Worthington serves as Artistic Administrator/Composer Advocate for the New York Women Composers.