Artistic Voice

Stephen Cabell (b. 1984) is a Los Angeles-based composer and educator whose music seeks to engage, enrich, and disturb. Originally from Owensboro in western Kentucky, he writes across orchestral, wind ensemble, chamber, vocal, electroacoustic, electronic, and film music, drawing from classical and popular traditions as well as nature, visual art, literature, social questions, and Western esotericism.

His work is often vivid, visceral, and formally economical, shaped by organic pacing, unexpected combinations, and moments of concentrated impact.

Cabell’s music moves between extremes: austere and sensual, satirical and sincere, luminous and unstable. He is drawn to pieces that feel both carefully made and emotionally dangerous—music that invites the listener in, deepens attention, and unsettles what feels familiar. While his works often begin from concrete images, rituals, texts, or extra-musical ideas, he values the listener’s own interpretation and the private meanings that emerge through performance.

Recent Work

Recent projects include Symphony: “Transmutation,” a large-scale orchestral work premiered by the Mostly Modern Orchestra in 2025; Nocturne in Parallax, a piano trio written for the Suncoast Composer Fellowship Program in Sarasota, Florida; Book of Spells, a brass quintet written for the Atlantic Brass Quintet; Antidotum Tarantulæ, a double brass quintet commissioned by the Los Angeles Brass Alliance; and Echo’s Lament, a work for solo horn and piano pedal commissioned by the Curtis Institute of Music for its 100th anniversary.

Across these works, Cabell’s catalogue reflects a continuing interest in ritual, transformation, memory, danger, and the emotional charge of sound.

Multisensory Practice

Cabell’s current work increasingly extends into multimodal and multisensory spaces, exploring how sound interacts with scent, flavor, touch, memory, embodiment, and perception. These projects treat music not as a closed medium, but as part of a larger field of sensory experience, where aroma, taste, texture, atmosphere, and ritual shape how sound is received and remembered.

This work includes projects for scent and music, flavor and music, tactile texture and music, and performance environments in which listening is altered by nonvisual sensory materials. Rather than treating scent, flavor, or touch as decorative additions, Cabell approaches them as structural and expressive forces: volatile, intimate, ephemeral materials that can intensify musical experience, activate memory, and create new kinds of attention.

Recognition and Performance

His music has been recognized with the Marylyn K. Glick Young Composer Award from the Indianapolis Symphony, two Morton Gould Young Composer Awards, the Joseph H. Bearns Prize in Music from Columbia University, the Prix Nadia Boulanger from Les Écoles d’Art Américaines de Fontainebleau, the Peter David Faith Endowed Memorial Award in Composition, the Hans J. Salter Endowed Music Award, and ASCAP Plus Awards.

His residencies and fellowships include Yaddo, Les Écoles d’Art Américaines de Fontainebleau, the Suncoast Composer Fellowship Program, Lewes Chamber Music Festival, Queens New Music Festival, Aspen Music Festival and School, Mostly Modern Festival, and Atlantic Music Festival.

Cabell’s orchestral works have been performed by the Indianapolis Symphony, Owensboro Symphony, Mostly Modern Orchestra, Atlantic Music Festival Orchestra, USC Thornton Orchestra and Wind Ensemble, and Curtis Symphony, among others. He has worked with conductors including Teddy Abrams, David Amado, Yoonhak Baek, Andrew Hauze, Nicholas Palmer, H. Robert Reynolds, Benjamin Schwartz, and Mario Venzago.

Chamber music remains central to his catalogue, with performances by the Atlantic Brass Quintet, American Modern Ensemble, Talea Ensemble, Ensemble Dal Niente, Mostly Modern Ensemble, Los Angeles Brass Alliance, Iktus Percussion, Lisa Moore, Sean Kennard, Futaba Niekawa, Alicia Choi, and others.

Teaching and Training

As an educator and mentor, Cabell is a Visiting Associate Professor of Music Theory at Occidental College. He also serves as composition faculty and Composition Program Coordinator for Mostly Modern Festival in Saratoga Springs, New York, and Middelburg, Netherlands, where he works closely with emerging composers, guest faculty, performers, and conductors.

He previously taught at Chapman University, the Manhattan School of Music Precollege, the Kaufman Music Center, and the Atlantic Music Festival.

Cabell studied composition with Sean Friar and Andrew Norman at the USC Thornton School of Music, where he earned the D.M.A.; with Christopher Rouse at The Juilliard School, where he earned the M.M.; and with Richard Danielpour, Jennifer Higdon, and David Ludwig at the Curtis Institute of Music, where he earned the B.M. He is also a graduate of Interlochen Arts Academy, where he studied French horn, piano, and composition.

Beyond Music

Away from composing and teaching, Cabell is often in the kitchen, experimenting with food, drinks, smoke, and flavor as forms of gathering, craft, and improvisation. His interest in material practices also extends to bookbinding, perfumery, and tincture making, where process, patience, and sensory detail become forms of study. He also builds simple instruments and contraptions, including microtonally tuned pipes , and shares his home with Toney , an orange tabby cat of considerable authority.