Reinaldo Moya
Associate Professor of Music
Venezuelan-American composer and educator. Interested in writing vibrant music inspired by immigrant stories, identity, and the issues of our time.
Reinaldo Moya is a graduate of Venezuela’s El Sistema music education system. He is the recipient of the Charles Ives Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letter, the McKnight Composers Fellowship, the Van Lier Fellowship, and the Aaron Copland Award. He was the winner of the Ellis-Beauregard Foundation Composer Award, leading to the commissioning of his Piano Concerto for Joyce Yang and the Bangor Symphony Orchestra. As the Composer-Residence at The Schubert Club 2017-19, he wrote Tienda: a chamber opera praised by The Star Tribune for its "proud individuality.” His opera Memory Boy, with a libretto by Mark Campbell, was commissioned by the Minnesota Opera and premiered in 2016.
His works have been performed by the Minnesota Orchestra, the San Diego Symphony, the Juilliard Orchestra, the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela, the New Jersey Symphony. Other performers include the Jasper and Attacca String Quartets, the Oberlin Conservatory Orchestra, the Da Capo Chamber Players, the Lysander Piano Trio, among others. He is a graduate of The Juilliard School with masters and doctorate degrees, studying with Samuel Adler and Robert Beaser. Mr. Moya has taught at St. Olaf College, the Interlochen Arts Camp, and Augsburg University in Minneapolis.
Mr. Moya’s teaching is focused on helping the students make the connections between the classroom and real-life music-making. In all of his courses he aims to bring a global perspective that acknowledges and celebrates the centrality of music to the human experience. He has developed a pedagogy that looks for ways to decolonize the musical canon and get to the fundamentals of music across cultures. He emphasizes interaction, music-making, and discussion in the classroom. In his theory classes, he uses composition and creativity as means of assessing students’ learning and understanding of the course materials.
His course offerings include classes within the music theory curriculum, as well as courses on Composition, Film Music and Scoring, Latin American and Caribbean Music, Songwriting, Composition lessons, and others.
He is genuinely passionate about collaboration. He feels that working with musicians, writers, dancers, and filmmakers has brought about the most important and meaningful learning opportunities for him as an artist and human being. His work as a composer and educator complement and reinforce one another. He is passionate about discovering, studying and presenting music from Latin America and the Caribbean. In addition to these activities, he advocates for better opportunities for music creators of all kinds through his work in various organizations such as the American Composers Forum, the Chicago Philharmonic,the Brooklyn Art Song Society, and others.
Mr. Moya loves spending time with his wife Francesca, and their two children: Leo and Sienna. He enjoys cooking, reading, films and video games. He is a huge soccer fan and follows FC Barcelona and Tottenham Hotspur.