Lila Meretzky

Lila Meretzky is a composer, educator, and visual artist born and raised in New York City. She works primarily in chamber, vocal, electronic, and electroacoustic mediums, as well as in music for dance, film, and installation. Her work is often concerned with (the warping of) memory and language, and subjective experiences of time. Lila’s music has been commissioned and programmed by leading artists, ensembles, and institutions, including Alarm Will Sound, Contemporaneous, TAK Ensemble, the MATA Festival, Sandbox Percussion, Unheard-of//Ensemble, icarus Quartet, and percussionist Ji Hye Jung. Lila is a current composer-in-residence with the Cincinnati-based new music collective New Downbeat. She has created music for the dance companies New Dialect, X-Contemporary Dance, and the Nashville Ballet.

Her film work includes scoring the 2022 documentary A Climate of Anxiety. As a critic, her writings have been published on the arts blog ArtsNash and she has been featured on the radio at WXNA Nashville. On February 27, 2024 Lila’s evening length orchestral song cycle, Songs at Night, was premiered by Contemporaneous with vocal soloists Lucy Dhegrae and Milena Gligic, with projections of Lila’s art by designer Camilla Tassi, marking the culmination of a multi-year project exploring the Yiddish poetry of Anna Margolin. 2025 will see the premiere of a piano concerto for Anthony Ratinov and the Los Angeles-based choral ensemble Lyric Edge, as well as the release of Lila’s debut album of percussion works Bone Dice, and a retrospective album of
chamber and large ensemble works on Sawyer Editions.
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As an educator, Lila is on the faculty of the Walden School in Dublin, New Hampshire, and previously taught at the Yale School of Music’s Music in Schools Initiative, and W.O. Smith Music School in Nashville, Tennessee. She has also taught music technology and composition in the Yale University Department of Music. Lila has attended such festivals as the Next Festival of Emerging Artists, Cortona Sessions for New Music, and Bang on a Can Summer Festival. At Bang on a Can, her works were performed as part of the first LOUD Weekend at Mass MoCA in July 2021. Her other pursuits include performing with the choral ensembles C4 and Downtown Voices, and making noise on her laptop and accordion.
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Paper collage is her primary visual medium, and her work has been featured in Off Latch Press’ inaugural Off Latch Zine. She also creates sculpture and video work. Lila is a graduate of the Blair School of Music at Vanderbilt University, where she co-founded a new music concert series called A Humming Under My Feet. She also holds Master of Music and Master of Musical Arts degrees in composition from the Yale School of Music. Lila’s music is mainly self-published through OVNDROYT Music. Her vocal music can be found in the catalog of TUX People’s Music.

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