Emma Cardon-Wake

Emma Cardon-Wake is a composer, harpsichordist, cellist, and pianist from Logan, Utah.  As a composer, she has been recognized as an MTNA Composition Young Artist National 2nd place winner, an ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Awards Honorable Mention and Finalist, a NFMC National Winner and recipient of the Olga Klein Nelson Award, and a multiple-year National YoungArts Foundation merit winner.

Cardon-Wake has received commissions from the acclaimed Fry Street Quartet, the American Festival Chorus and Orchestra, the Caine Undergraduate Research Quartet, and the Utah State University Symphony Orchestra.  She recently celebrated the publication of a solo piano suite, as well as the premiere of an original chamber opera, A Storm We Call Progress, in 2020.

Cardon-Wake has spent recent summers studying composition at the Cortona Sessions for New Music, the EAMA Summer Music Institute, Boston University Tanglewood Institute, and the Brevard Music Center.  As an undergraduate student at Vanderbilt University’s Blair School of Music, she provided harpsichord continuo for the baroque ensemble for three years, as well as participated in the Vanderbilt University Orchestra as a section cellist.  Cardon-Wake graduated in 2021 with a B.M. in Composition and a Minor in Harpsichord Performance.  In 2023, she received her Master of Music in Composition at the Cleveland Institute of Music, where she was the recipient of the Donald Erb Prize in Composition and the Isada-Stillman-Varma Award in Music Theory.  She is currently pursuing a Doctoral Degree in Composition at Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music.