biography
about me:
Introspective and story-based: that’s how Maxie Lawrence Soja describes their music when asked. For them, music is incredibly personal and any attempt to sever that tie when creating a new piece ends the same way: with failure.
Failure isn’t a bad thing to Soja, but rather a process of art and life. With their highly autobiographically and programmatic music, their soundscapes tend to focus on breaking modal traditions and expectations, pushing the boundaries of comfortability just enough to leave the audience unsure what to expect next. Each piece is another puzzle to decipher, the outward appearance of each seemingly modal with odd deviations, but with a closer look it is clear that most of her melodic and harmonic origins come from post-tonal theory practices. Inspired greatly by the works of Anton Webern, Alban Berg, Dmitri Shostakovich, and other contemporary composers, their introduction of odd tonal practices in light of traditional diatonicism becomes clear. Using numerology and arithmetic mod 12, their extensive background in studying mathematics helps in encoding specific messages, names, and meanings into each piece.
Their current style is structuralist and spacial, with the prime focus to throw off the audience as much as possible on an initial listen. The idea is to create expectations, break them, thus forcing the creation of less traditional expectations. Exploring 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, Soja’s music tends toward a more serious path. They mainly write for medium-sized chamber ensembles to large orchestras, but don’t shy away from art songs, solo works, and smaller chamber pieces.
Having graduated from SUNY Purchase’s Conservatory of Music in May of 2025 with a Bachelor’s in Classical Composition and a Minor in Mathematics and Computer Science, they are currently pursuing a Master’s in Composition at Brooklyn College while studying with Dr. Dalit Warshaw. During their time at Purchase College, they studied with Laura Kaminsky, Kamala Sankaram, and Gregory Spears. Notable compositions include the emotionality of a machine (2024), composed for the American Modern Ensemble for the 5th season of the Mostly Modern Festival, as well as orchestra pieces Δt (2024; composed for the Purchase Symphony Orchestra) and prelude to a Siren’s Song (and the consequences it brings) (2026; composed for the Brooklyn College Orchestra). They have also worked with esteemed groups Syabrite5 (2024; String Quintet No. 1, “proactively, goodbye”) and Yarn/Wire (2025; do not resuscitate) for concerts, readings, and recordings.
