Sequoia Reed Quintet

A few days late but Sequoia is honored to have taken the 🥈 Prize at this year’s Fischoff Competition!!! It was a long road coming for the ensemble but we are so thankful for three days of wonderful performances! In the next few weeks we will begin uploading our recordings from the competition, as well as from our concert at the MAG in March. Thank you all!

Hello everyone!! Our concert at is a little over a week away so we wanted to share with you a little bit about the composer of our new work ! ⬇️

Ben West is an interdisciplinary composer, guitarist, and educator based in Providence, RI. Among others, they have been commissioned by The New York Philharmonic Orchestra, Yo-Yo Ma, The Akropolis Reed Quintet, Kinan Azmeh, Quartetto Indaco, The Playground Ensemble, and The Neave Trio. Their works have been performed throughout the United States and Europe at Lincoln Center, the Mostly Modern Festival, highSCORE festival, Brown University, Harvard University and more. Ben has also been a teaching artist for the Very Young Composers program in Colorado and in New York City. Ben is currently focused on how communal sound making practices can interface with experimental and free-form compositional tools to create an ever so evolving and questioning musical experience. Ben is very invested in how practices such as soundpainting and soundmapping can be useful compositional, educational and communal ways of manipulating sounds and experiences. As a guitarist and bass player Ben engages with free-improvisation, noise rock, and many other experimental forms of sound creation and mixes that with their classical upbringing. Ben is also invested in thinking about how transness and non-binary bodies can form music in the cracks of society.

Ben is currently finishing up their undergraduate degree at Brown University and has worked with Wang Lu, Anthony Cheung, Eric Nathan, Eric DeLuca, and Kristina Warren. Other close mentors of theirs include Meredith Monk, Gabriel Kahane, Jon Deak, Conrad Kehn.