Carlos Simon

Carlos Simon, an African American composer whose works address social justice themes, has earned frequent performances from leading orchestras throughout the United States. In 2021 the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., named him its composer-in-residence.

Born in Washington, D.C., in 1986, Simon grew up in Atlanta as the son of a Pentecostal preacher whose household permitted only gospel music. He has cited the influence of gospel on his concert pieces, which fuse notated material with improvisatory passages. At age ten he began playing piano at his father’s church and soon started formal lessons. He earned degrees from Morehouse College and Georgia State University in Atlanta, then completed a doctorate at the University of Michigan, where his teachers included Michael Daugherty and Evan Chambers. After graduation he worked as a keyboard player and musical director for R&B singers Angie Stone and Jennifer Holliday. In 2018 he received a Sundance/Time Warner Composer Fellowship. His 2017 composition Amen! for wind ensemble was recorded in 2019 by the North Texas Wind Symphony.

Commissions have come to him from the New York Philharmonic, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, the Los Angeles Opera, and the Washington National Opera. He drew wide notice with Requiem for the Enslaved, a piece that weaves African American spirituals together with the Latin requiem mass rendered in English or treated as source material for instrumental writing, as well as spoken-word elements. In 2021 he received the Sphinx Medal of Excellence, becoming only the second composer to earn that honor. The following year he appeared on a Washington Post list of Composers and Performers to Watch in 2022. Signed to the Decca label, Simon issued an album that year featuring Requiem for the Enslaved performed by the Hub New Music ensemble with rapper and spoken-word artist Marco Pavé. He serves as an assistant professor at Georgetown University, the institution whose sale of slaves supplies part of the narrative in Requiem for the Enslaved. He planned a new work for the Minnesota Orchestra in 2023 as a tribute to George Floyd.