Ty Bloomfield (b. 2000) is a multimedia composer, educator, and curator originally from Chicago, IL. Recognized for his “unpredictable” (Third Coast Review) music, his work engages audiences in immersive experiences with intimate, yet electric soundscapes while exploring themes of memory, contemporary art, the inner and outer self, and group dynamics. His accolades include the Harvard University Fromm Foundation Fellowship; an American Composers Orchestra Earshot Reading; the Karen Slack Prize (at the George Shirley Vocal Competition); two finalist placements for the ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Award (2025, 2023); and a 2022-2023 JACK Studio Fellow. He has been a participant at the Composers Conference, CCI, the Lake George Music Festival, the NATS Mentorship Program for Composers, and the Suncoast Composer Fellowship Program.

His works have been featured internationally at festivals and venues, including the DiMenna Center for Classical Music, Avaloch Farm Music Institute, U.S. Navy Band Saxophone Symposium, the Dublin International Chamber Music Festival, the College Band Director National Association Conference, International Trombone Festival, Ear Taxi New Music Festival, Heidelberg University New Music Festival, International Clarinet Association New Music Weekend, and the Red Note New Music Festival. His recent collaborators include the American Composers Orchestra, the Pacific Chamber Orchestra, the JACK Quartet, Hypercube, Unheard-Of//Ensemble, The Rhythm Method, PART, and Lati2de, among many other ensembles and soloists. Upcoming works include projects with the White Snakes Project, the George Shirley Vocal Competition, and violinist Matt Albert, with recent commissions from New Music Chicago, the National Association of Teachers of Singing, and the Cincinnati Song Initiative.

He is currently on faculty at Eastern Michigan University and the Ypsilanti Youth Orchestra where he teaches music theory and composition, and aural skills. He holds a master’s degree in composition from the University of Michigan where he received the Dorothy Greenwald Graduate Fellowship. His primary mentors include Bright Sheng, Michael Daugherty, Carl Schimmel, and Roger Zare.

Bloomfield is based in Ann Arbor, MI and serves as the director of Syntax New Music.

click here for his curriculum vitae.

ARTISTIC STATEMENT

As both a proud African-American and, strictly, a classical musician, I have no interest in prioritizing the “expected” or “traditional” aspects of sound and genre of those associated with blackness within my artistic voice. Instead, my practice engages with notable artistic contributions to African-American culture through reflecting on their emotional content and meaning, and infusing it within my sound approaches which include soft, repetitive noises underneath tender harmonies. While this is primarily accomplished through techniques such as the emotional translation of an appreciated into my own music, the blending of spoken poetry drama and cadences with American art song traditions, and the subtle acknowledgments of the many sociopolitical imbalances often addressed in the embedded stories of these art forms, my decisions in how I choose to complete this mission varies in amount and style from every project — from incredibly subtle and unacknowledged to not at all.