Rory Bricca

Hello there! My name is Rory, and I am a composer, conductor, arranger, pianist, and French horn player pursuing a B.A. in Music at Yale University ('26). My work spans from classical to contemporary music, from jazz to musical theater, all united by a common joy and enthusiasm for the act of creating music.

My compositions are often described as “playful” or “whimsical.” I am committed to writing music that is both novel and accessible, and in this vein am unafraid to use traditional elements like melody, harmony, and counterpoint while silmultaneously exploring 20th and 21st century compositional techniques. Recently, my music has also taken inspiration from concepts in astronomy, psychology, and neuroscience.

"It was so refreshing to hear a piece of new music where I found myself unconsciously humming the tune afterwards. Not only is it catchy, but it's well-conceived, well-structured, well-developed, evocative, quirky... I could go on and on." - Clancy Newman, winner of the International Naumburg Competition, on Duplicity
Bio
I was born in 2004 in New Haven, CT to documentary filmmakers Lisa Molomot and Jacob Bricca. I started taking piano lessons at age five, but in my childhood, I would often get distracted from practicing my assigned piano repertoire and start making up my own music instead.

At age ten, I moved to Tucson, AZ, where I was fortuntate to find many great music opportunities. I took classical piano lessons with Dr. Ian Houghton for eight years, played in Rincon/University High School's competition winning marching and concert bands, and performed in the Tucson Jazz Institute’s nationally award-winning Ellington Big Band. Most significantly, I participated for five years in the Tucson Symphony Orchestra’s Young Composers Project where I studied with Ilona Gay and Dr. Vincent Calianno, received workshops with each section of the orchestra, and composed yearly orchestral pieces that were performed by the symphony. The first of these pieces, Landfall, written at age 14, went on to be featured in four concerts by the Tucson Symphony Orchestra the following year with audiences totaling over 8,000. I now study composition with Dr. Kathryn Alexander at Yale, where my piece Duplicity was premiered by the Yale Concert Band in Yale's historic Woolsey Hall.

I have taken advantage of many musical opportunities at Yale. I play French horn in and have served as General Manager for the Yale Concert Band. As Head Student Arranger for the Yale Precision Marching Band, I created more than a dozen original pep band arrangements, mostly of pop songs released in the last three years. I have played orchestral percussion and French horn in the Davenport Pops Orchestra. I play piano for and am one of the leaders of the Crescent Sextet, a jazz combo that plays gigs around town. I composed music for the 2024 production of Angels in America: Millenium Approaches at Yale. Last fall, I fell in love with the musical theater genre while taking the Yale course Composing for Musical Theater with the Broadway pianist, conductor, and composer Joshua Rosenblum. I also played keys in the Yale Dramatic Association’s 2024 production of Legally Blonde the Musical.

Last summer, I studied intensive Italian language in Venice with the Columbia Summer in Venice program. There, I met the dancer, filmmaker, and visual artist Lily Selthofner for whose multimedia works Venezia Scalzo, Acqua Alta, and Ultimate Catharsis 1 I have created sets of piano improvisations.

Recently, I have also gotten involved as a music director/conductor in various capacities at Yale. I am the bandleader for the Pierson Swing Band, Yale’s only student-run jazz big band. In the musical theater realm, I served as co-music director and pianist for the reading of The Postmodern Prometheus, an original musical about sentient AI, ancient philosophy, and the absurdity of college life by Aaron and Emma Ventresca; I will serve as music director again for a full production of one of the duo’s shows going up next February. I will also be co-music directing the US premiere of Argentinian composer Mariano Fernandez's Spanish-language opera Darwin e Patagonia by the Opera Theater at Yale College, going up this December. In the fall I will begin formally studying conducting with Maestro William Boughton.

For my final project in the Yale history of music theory course Tuning and Temperament: Analytical and Historical Approaches, I wrote an analysis of the microtonal choral/orchestral piece vokas animo (2019) by fellow Tucson-based composer Robert Lopez-Hanshaw, which uses 72 equal divisions of the octave to approximate the ancient Greek enharmonic genus and 11-limit extended just intonation. You can read my 12-page analysis here.

In summer 2024, I attended the Brevard Composition Institute in the Blue Mountains of North Carolina, where studied with Dr. Greg Simon. To fund this program, I received a merit scholarship, the Yale Arts Apprenticeship Summer Experience Award, the R. J. R. Cohen Summer Fellowship, and the John E. Linck and Alanne Headland Linck Fellowship.

Other interests of mine include hiking, strategy board games, speaking Italian, and developing a personal philosophy of life.

Bio