Anjelica Lindsey’s 2025 Musical Year in Review

Marfa, 2025

Oklahoma Woman Quartet Premiere at Oklahoma Center for Humanities, October 1, 2025

Oklahoma Woman Quartet at All Souls Unitarian Church, March 1, 2025

Oklahoma Woman Quartet, October 1, 2025

This year held both extraordinary growth and deep loss, and I am grateful for every part of the path. I made a great deal of music, learned more than I imagined, and stayed steady through moments that changed me.

In March I premiered Oklahoma Woman Quartet for an audience of more than 300 thanks to support from Artists Creative Fund and CACHE. Following the premiere I was named a Public Fellow for the University of Tulsa’s Oklahoma Center for Humanities. I spent the summer rebuilding my orchestrations and presented a new premiere with the University of Tulsa’s Hurricane Quartet in October as part of my fellowship, which marked the first time a Cherokee woman composer had premiered a string quartet.

In August, the quartet reconvened to record the studio album, OKLAHOMA WOMAN QUARTET, at our production headquarters, Wild Mountain Studios with Mark Kuykendall, and the album is forthcoming in 2026!

With the support of my mentor in New York who was my original composition teacher at Juilliard, Dr. Daniel Felsenfeld, I began writing Symphony No. 1: Love Incantations. Through research with musicologists, I learned it may be the first symphony written by a Native American woman, something I once believed was far out of reach.

I received meaningful opportunities in the Indigenous music community. Dr. Lorena Navarro commissioned a percussion solo, which became Cherokee Gothic for marimba. Composer, pianist and curator Connor Chee invited me to contribute to the newest iteration of the Indigenous songbook Weaving Sounds to be published in 2026, in which I offered a piano version of I Write So Thunderous. Cherokee violinist Ashtin Johnson commissioned Soliloquy for violin and piano for her doctoral recital, which will be performed in 2026.

It was also an honor to have my piece Eroica premiered at the Good Medicine Indigenous Music Festival in Houston, Texas, led by Mvskoke woman composer Aryn Ward and performed by an all-Indigenous trio of renowned baritone and multi-instrumentalist Mark Billy on clarinet, festival organizer and Mvskoke composer Aryn Ward on flute, and Cherokee composer Kiegan Ryan on cello.

Another meaningful part of 2025 was being invited to participate in the Music to Life Musician Changemaker Accelerator Workshop, where I was named a Music to Life Juried Artist. The experience strengthened my commitment to socially engaged music which led me to launch the Repertoire Inclusion Initiative. This initiative encourages institutions to include the music of living women and Native composers in their repertoire, films, commissions and more to shift inclusion in music.

Mark and I composed two feature-length documentary scores in our studio for two feature length documentary films directed by Jeremy Charles, which screened at First Americans Museum and many other venues and festivals. I continued my studies in Scoring to Picture with Juilliard in the spring, which strengthened my love for orchestral film writing and pushed our minimalist Buchla and modular synthesis work into new territory.

At Wild Mountain Studio we produced music for wonderful artists in our community, including a recording session with composer and violist Mimi Dye and her nine-piece ensemble of players from Tulsa Symphony Orchestra. These are the moments that made the studio feel alive.

Mark and I are also excited to pursue membership with The Recording Academy in the 2026 class. And we made time for travel, including a trip to Santa Fe for my 40th and as well as a visit to Marfa where we studied the work of artist Donald Judd in honor of our beloved friend Caleb Reed, whose absence continues to shape our days. While there we also enjoyed seeing a long time favorite band Stereolab at Marfa Ballroom with our friend and artist Elisa Harkins.

This year held joy, grief, surprises, and resilience. I am grateful for the music that arrived, the collaborations that grew, and the courage it takes to make art at all.

Here’s to a new year of creating.