Who am I?

Maxie Lawrence Soja is a twenty-year-old composition student at SUNY Purchase College’s Conservatory of Music pursuing her Bachelors. Focusing on the emotional complications of one’s life events in her music, she explores the philosophical and abstract. She blends different modal soundscapes and embraces dissonance to create colors she believes are not always common in modern contemporary art. Maxie is a self-described autobiographical and concrete-abstract composer who composes mainly for medium-sized chamber ensembles and orchestra, but doesn’t shy away from art songs, solo works, and smaller chamber pieces. She strives to explore her past, current, and future connections with various complex topics and emotions, such as death and grieving, stagnation and perfectionism, and friendship-familial ties and growth.

Although a composer, Maxie also creates short-form poetry, finding the connection of text and music and its application to her compositional topics to be just as important and intriguing as a more abstract instrumental work. Though consequently very different in form and practice, she strives to create vocal works that accurately describe the emotional states.

Having studied with Laura Kaminsky, Kamala Sankaram, and Gregory Spears while studying at SUNY Purchase, she is looking forward to furthering her music education by pursuing a Master's in Music Composition. She has also attended the Mostly Modern Festival, composing a short medium chamber work for the American Modern Ensemble.