Using intricate shimmering colors over re-imagined fragments of tunes, composer Sheree Clement builds surprising comedic narratives. She upends listeners’ expectations with politically charged texts and over-the-top staged and semi-staged dramas. All with the goal of waking us up to the upheaval, conflicting truths, and possibilities of now.  Sheree writes chamber and orchestral music, as well as opera and music video works that have been performed by the Tanglewood Music Festival Orchestra, the New York New Music Ensemble, and Speculum Musicae. Recent works explore real world challenges via imaginative scenarios, such as two people battling for custody of a table full of 40 pounds of silverware, a young woman defending her dream of being a mermaid and visiting the traditional fable, ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes.’  

Current projects include Swimming Upstream: The Androscoggin, a kitchen-table opera dramedy, in which four family members duke it out over the politics of a river in western Maine, and a new work for piano four-hands for the Guevara-Zhelezova Piano Duo.

Her works have been performed at Merkin Hall, NYC, Sanders Theatre, Cambridge, MA, and Yerba Buena Center, San Francisco. Commissions include The League of Composers Orchestra, soprano Ariadne Greif, and the Momenta Quartet. And among the honors she’s received are a Goddard Lieberson Award, a NYSCA Artist Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Premiered via livestream, her work, Table Manners, was described by a viewer as ‘whimsical, passionate, intriguing, voluptuous...’.  The New York Times described her Chamber Concerto, for sinfonietta, as ‘intriguing’… ‘fascinating in its explorations of instrumental color’ [with] ‘arresting moments of calm’.

Curating and presenting concerts in NYC for the last 20 years, Sheree has served in a variety of roles in several non-profit new music organizations, where she focused on financial stability and programming that champions stylistic and musician / composer diversity. She currently serves as President of the Board of Directors for the New York New Music Ensemble (NYNME) and as President of the Association for the Promotion of New Music (APNM).  She is an active board member of the League of Composers / ISCM and a member of NYWC and IAWM.  Broadly, she is interested in creating non-judgmental politically-adjacent works that spark open conversation and real change across dinner tables and board rooms. And she is committed to making that work and other people’s like-minded works available to mainstream audiences.