An eclectic composer of many interests and influences, Kris Maloy writes music bridging many styles and genres. His music has been described as “beautifully paced,” and “of great elegance…expansively lyrical” (David LaMarche, New York Concert Review), and his work has received honors and awards in music composition from the American Composers Forum, the Minnesota Orchestra Composers Institute, the Cleveland Chamber Orchestra’s Young and Emerging Composers Series, the New York Virtuoso Singers, the Meistersingers, the Choral Arts Ensemble, the Music08 Eighth Blackbird Composition Competition, the Look & Listen Festival Prize, the North American Saxophone Alliance, the University of Kentucky New Music Festival, and numerous awards and honors from the Society of Composers, Inc., and ASCAP. Recent commissions include Quartet in Four Actions for the chamber music group BrightMusic (recently performed at Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall), White Heat for the University of Central Oklahoma’s award-winning Jazz Orchestra, Flourish for Duo Clarion (clarinetist Chad Burrow and pianist Amy Cheng), Visions & Fantasies, a concerto for soloist and orchestra commissioned by the St. Louis School of Music, and Flight of Spirit and Bountiful Sky, both for high school wind ensembles. He has recently been awarded artist residencies at the Banff Centre for the Arts in Alberta, Canada, and the Ucross Foundation arts colony in Wyoming. His next major commissioned work in progress is a Double Concerto for Two Violins and Orchestra to be premiered in the spring of 2012.
Maloy holds degrees in music composition from Oklahoma City University, where he received a Bachelor of Music degree in 2000, graduating Summa cum Laude. He received a Master of Music degree in composition from Bowling Green State University in 2002, and a Doctor of Musical Arts degree at the University of Texas at Austin in 2005. He has studied composition with Donald Grantham, Kevin Puts, Marilyn Shrude, Edward Knight, and Mikel Kuehn, and electroacoustic music with Russell Pinkston, Bruce Pennycook, and Elainie Lillios.
An active saxophonist, Maloy has been a featured performer in both classical and jazz settings. He has received two Outstanding Individual Achievement Awards in Jazz from the National Association of Jazz Educators (in 1997 and again in 1999) for featured performances at the Wichita Jazz Festival. His performances have also been featured at Society of Composers, Inc. conferences, both regional and national, between 2002 and 2008, and at the North American Saxophone Alliance International Conference in 2002.
Maloy was inducted into Pi Kappa Lambda National Music Honor Society in 1999. He is a member of SCI and ASCAP, and currently teaches at the Bass School of Music at Oklahoma City University, the University of Central Oklahoma, and at UCO’s Jazz Lab. He is an instructor in composition, jazz and commercial arranging, orchestration, improvisation, songwriting, saxophone, music theory, and aural skills.
