Biography

Priding herself on her introspective and psychological look on music, Maxie Lawrence Soja focuses heavily on writing autobiographical programmatic music. She blends different modal soundscapes and embraces dissonance to create colors she believes are not always common in modern contemporary art. To achieve this, she derives much inspiration from ‘grotesque’ composers such as Dmitri Shostakovich and serialist composers such as Alban Berg and Anton Webern as well as numerology, encoding messages of exactly what she means into her music. 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. She writes mainly for medium-sized chamber ensembles to large orchestras, but doesn’t shy away from art songs, solo works, and smaller chamber pieces.

A recent graduate from SUNY Purchase’s Conservatory of Music, she holds a Bachelor’s in Classical Composition with a Minor in Mathematics and Computer Science. During her time at Purchase College, she studied with Laura Kaminsky, Kamala Sankaram, and Gregory Spears. She will be attending Brooklyn College for a Masters in Music Composition in the Fall. She has also attended the Mostly Modern Festival during its 5th season (June 2025), composing a short medium chamber work for the American Modern Ensemble.

On the literature side of her artistic career, she 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. In her poetry, she focuses on the dark ironic truth of broken relationships and family as well as the rotting, nauseating feeling of facing these truths and conflicts.