The Rocket Science of Music: Arlene Sierra ’87

10/15/2026

By Leah Borromeo
When she arrived at Ransom Everglades as a sophomore, Arlene Sierra ’87 found her lifelong passion for the arts stirred by the natural wonders populating RE’s bayfront upper school campus. Even as she honed her musical skills with instructors largely off campus, the connection between nature and art that developed at RE would serve as the creative foundation of a career as an internationally acclaimed composer.

Yet what actually launched her career was neither her passion for music nor her love of nature. It was the recognition that few women worked in the field of musical composition – which she described as “the rocket science of music.” When she listened to the pieces produced by some of her college classmates at the Oberlin College-Conservatory, she was not impressed. She believed she could excel in the field – and that she must try.

“These young composers – who were all guys – had so much attitude and were considered the ultimate cool kids, the ‘rocket scientists of music’ because they could write musical compositions,” she recalled. “I was intimidated when I met them, and then I heard their music, and I thought: I could do better.

“Being one of the really very, very few women who were doing it inspired me,” she said. “It made me more determined … You have to learn harmony, counterpoint, all the notation, and you have to learn all the instruments, understand their ranges and how they work, a lot of technical knowledge.”

The dream led to an incredible workload. “I was prepared for that part of it,” she said. “I already knew what kind of art I liked.”

The desire to produce music with the best in the world drove her rise through Oberlin, the Yale School of Music, the University of Michigan (where she earned her doctorate) and studies in Paris and Berlin. She currently works as a composer in London while also serving as Professor of Music Composition at Cardiff University in Wales.

“Being one of the really very, very few women who were doing it inspired me. It made me more determined.”

Arlene Sierra ’87

Her award-winning composition work has been described as having “its own character, in which historical and contemporary influences are fused into a highly flexible and distinctive style” and “packed with crisp, vivid detail that’s not at all hand-me-down.” She draws from her less-than-casual lifelong fascination with history, game theory, military strategy and, of course, nature.

The nature she experienced in Coconut Grove still defines many of her works. A number of her chamber and orchestral works employ birdsong and ideas from the natural world, incorporating real-world sounds and rhythms such as in Nature Symphony (2017), commissioned by the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra and Radio 3. Bird Symphony (2022), for the Utah Symphony, plays with scale and distance using transcriptions and field recordings of birdsong.

Today’s music students at Ransom Everglades can choose from a chamber ensemble, a string orchestra, a jazz combo, a panoply of bands from jazz to concert to symphonic. They can study voice, guitar and advanced placement music theory. Not so in Arlene Sierra’s day.

“When I was at Ransom Everglades, I knew of only one other serious musician,” she said. “Ransom was well known for academics and sports, but all that was offered for music was a wind ensemble – not an option for the piano student I was in those days.”

Despite the lack of advanced music classes, RE offered a vibrant intellectual and music culture.

“My musical ability wasn’t lost on my classmates,” she said. “I was asked to play keyboards and sing with a student rock band at a school fair and to accompany a comedy sketch for assembly by playing the Godfather theme on the piano; great fun!”

Added Sierra: “Two of my first friends at Ransom Everglades were Mike Malinin ’85, who later became the drummer for the Goo Goo Dolls, and Shawn Miller ’87, who is now a writer, lawyer and a longtime patron of my recording projects.”

She also recalls the academic growth she experienced at RE. “I loved history class with Mr. [Geoff] Pietsch, who always spoke to us like adults and had a kind of serene wisdom and humor,” Sierra remembers. “Our teachers were essentially college professors.”

Other favorite teachers were Evelyn La Russe, who taught Spanish and Robert (Doc) Crabtree, who taught Anatomy and Physiology. She recalled attending plays at the Coconut Grove Playhouse under former English teacher Blake Leach.

“I was very impressed by her bold musical and intellectual ideas ... That desire to learn and drive I encountered when I met Arlene nearly 40 years ago is still alive and kicking today.”

Michael Daugherty, composer

“We went to the productions as a class,” Sierra recalled. “It was a wonderful way to learn about writing, staging and dramatic timing, both essential in my work as a classical composer, especially when writing opera.”

The daughter of an artist and a doctor who were classical music lovers, Sierra and her family were “bohemian New Yorkers in a slightly alien landscape. Miami’s pace of life and its priorities were so different from ours,” she recalled with a laugh. She carries herself with the grounding of someone who has lived in international cities made stronger by the kind of knowledge exchange diverse migration brings about. She’s lived, studied and traveled around the world with her work in music including “a Berlin period to finish my doctorate while immersed in that city’s incredible classical music scene.”

She was also her own person. “I was often sent to [the dean of students’] office for my liberal interpretation of the school dress code,” she said, laughing. “I’d swap the preppy look for old men’s shirts my mom would use for painting, plus any black accessories to look more ‘alternative.’” They eventually agreed she would tuck in her shirt for 10 minutes during homeroom.

Sierra arrived at Ransom Everglades after having studied piano from the age of five. “I grew up with classical music playing at home and in the car,” she said. “I was taken to concerts, galleries and performances. I loved being surrounded by art and artists, where musical and artistic expression were second nature.

“My sister Grace (an interior designer) and I grew up in the 1970s and 80s, where we were able to explore our creativity and make our own fun,” she said. “I remember being very curious about the world around me, fascinated by Miami’s cultural mixes and clashes, and the huge contrast with our many trips to New York.”

She met some of her best, lifelong friends growing up in Florida.

“My best girlfriends at Ransom Everglades were April La Russe ’87 (Dr. La Russe’s daughter) and Aryn Rothfield ’87. We were the ‘three A’s’,” recalled Sierra. “Tragically, we lost Aryn to non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma a few years after graduation. But April happened to settle here in London to begin her career in finance. We remain good friends and still remember dear Aryn and our good times back in Miami.”

She also met the late RE college counselor James (Jim) Hatch. “I told him I wanted to go to New York or Boston for college, but Mr. Hatch somehow knew immediately that Oberlin would be the perfect place for me,” she said. “My reply was, ‘Ohio!? Why would I want to live in Ohio?’ He implored me to give it a chance and apply.”

Miami and New York City have contrasting natural worlds, but they’re still big coastal cities. Sierra was a big city kid. But through the Oberlin brochure she learned about its well-regarded conservatory of music combined with liberal arts. “It had endless opportunities for an artsy kid like me. I had offers from NYU and Boston College, too, but Oberlin was clearly the right place with music subsumed in every aspect of campus life. I loved the history of the place, that it was the first college to admit women and African-American students, and was a stop on the Underground Railroad.

“Initially, I thought I’d be a history major with a minor in piano but I ended up doing a double degree instead – a BA in East Asian Studies and a BMus in Electronic Music. Talk about wanting to make life difficult, it was a bit much when I found myself taking advanced music theory at the same time as second-year Chinese,” Sierra said. “But it was also a chance to start composing using all kinds of technology.”

Her first compositions were written for tape, synthesizers and, eventually, the acoustic instruments and ensembles that helped to launch her career.

The Midwest isn’t often thought of as a launchpad to the world, but while at Oberlin, she met Michael Daugherty, then the youngest composer teaching there. She asked how she could transfer from electronic music to composition. He told her to attend the Aspen Music Festival as a composer. When she returned with a clutch of new scores, he then encouraged her to apply to Yale.

“I was very impressed by her bold musical and intellectual ideas,” Daugherty said.

At Yale, she studied under Martin Bresnick and Jacob Druckman (a student of Aaron Copland), cementing her lineage among American contemporary music composers.

“The Arlene I taught was animated by a fierce desire to create her own art and her own world of creative achievement,” Bresnick recalled.

While at Yale, she obtained a scholarship to the American Conservatory in Fontainebleau, France, where she was taught by Betsy Jolas, a venerable figure in French and American contemporary music. Jolas showed by example that a woman working in the male-dominated field of classical music composition could succeed. Now 100 years old, Jolas says that she evoked her own career “to guide hers through this day and age after judging her interesting music and advising her here and there.”

“The Arlene I taught was animated by a fierce desire to create her own art and her own world of creative achievement.”

Martin Bresnick, composer

That guidance was mission critical.

Sierra’s music is the subject of a series of portrait recordings by Bridge Records. Arlene Sierra, Vol. 1, recorded by the International Contemporary Ensemble, was featured by NPR Classical, which described its “remarkable brilliance of color, rhythmic dexterity and playfulness.” The fourth volume in this series that spans around two decades, Birds and Insects, was released in 2025. Recent performers of her work include the London Sinfonietta, the Boston Symphony, the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, and the Tokyo Philharmonic.

In Truel (2002-04), her first piano trio, the listener is taken into a musical battle between three performers who embody roles as tactical opponents or mathematical variables. Her second piano trio, Butterflies Remember A Mountain, was inspired by a study of monarch butterfly migration on which violinist Nicola Benedetti plays. It premiered at the BBC Proms and it is something you should take time out of your day to listen to.

Sierra has been commissioned by the New York Philharmonic, was the first woman to win the Takemitsu Prize and received a Charles Ives Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her orchestral piece Moler for the Seattle Symphony received a Latin Grammy nomination for Best Contemporary Classical Composition in 2014: an apt honor for a composer born in Miami to a family with New York roots.

Since leaving Ransom Everglades, Sierra has built a body of work in which butterflies navigate by mountain memory, Roman siege engineers and Darwinian finches share the same formal logic, and the natural world isn’t a decorative backdrop but a structural part of the message. Gramophone magazine called her music “combative and utterly compelling,” a phrase that captures the dual nature of a composer who has always known what she is fighting for and what she wants the world to hear.

“I have been very impressed by the music Arlene has composed and by her many accomplishments,” Michael Daugherty said. “That desire to learn and drive I encountered when I met Arlene nearly 40 years ago is still alive and kicking today.”

For the past two decades, Sierra has lived in London with her husband, British composer Kenneth Hesketh, and their son, Elliott, who is also an aspiring musician. She keeps her freelance career separate from her work as a professor at Cardiff University, and has adapted well to a British pace of life – its unpredictable weather and awkward modernity steeped in centuries of history. Our meeting, for example, took place at a 900-year-old church that runs a coffee shop and co-working space when religious services aren’t on.

Sierra visited Ransom Everglades last April for the first time in years. She was amazed to see the physical transformation of the upper school campus, and even more excited to learn of its musical evolution.

“I’m so happy to see the music provision at Ransom Everglades is infinitely better now,” she said. “Even though I studied piano privately with University of Miami Professor Rosalina Sackstein, there was little to no awareness of living composers, never mind women composers from any era. As soon as I learned this, I wanted to change it.”

She’s been changing it in the most powerful way possible – with the creation of must-experience musical works.

Women only started playing in professional, mixed-gender symphonies at the start of the 20th century. Addressing this gender imbalance has been a motivation throughout Sierra’s life – and it continues even today.

“For years, I was in spaces where I was one of very few, and sometimes the only woman composer,” Sierra said. “I’d go to performances and festivals and realize mine was often the only woman’s voice to be heard. Things have improved in more recent years but there is still much work to be done.”

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