ABBY KELLEMS
ABOUT
Abby Kellems is a composer, performer, and arts administrator based in Colorado. Her work explores the images and intricacies of the natural world, and she focuses on creating musical experiences that facilitate a deeper relationship between listeners, performers, and the environment.
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Kellems holds a Master's in Music in Music Composition from the University of Colorado-Boulder, where she taught aural skills and studied with Annika Socolofsky and Michael Theodore. She received the Spark Award for Electroacoustic Composition in support of her piece Pre/postlude: Free Flow, a multimedia spatialized work created for the B2 Experimental Studio that explored the beauty and power of undammed rivers. She also received the Graduate Composer Award for her art song L'onde tremble comme une moire, which was commissioned by the Fauré Centennial Festival.
She holds a Bachelor’s of Music in Music Composition from the University of Oregon, where she studied with David Crumb and Robert Kyr. She received the Outstanding Undergraduate Scholar Awards in the areas of Music Theory and Composition from the UO School of Music and Dance, and graduated summa cum laude. Kellems was also selected for the University of Oregon’s Humanities Undergraduate Research Fellowship. Her paper "Six Contemporary American Women Composers: Creating Music as a Means of Environmental Activism" won the Center for Environmental Futures/Andrew W. Mellon Award.
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Kellems is a founding member of the Plein Air Sound Collective, an ecosystem of composers, performers, producers, and other artists with the common goal of exploring the relationship between sound and environment. The collective's inaugural project, Weathering Steel, was recorded at the Tank Center for Sonic Arts and released on May 2, 2025.
Recent commissions include works for the Boulder Altitude Directive, soprano Melissa Lubecke Sarabia, and saxophonist Joel Ferst. She's currently working on Music from Scrap, a collaborative performance and installation project with Jessie Lausé and Gavin Kitchen that enlivens recycling education through music making.
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​She is the Assistant Librarian at the Boulder Phil and likes to hike, read, bake, take slow-motion videos of water, and listen to live music.
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