Pulitzer Winner Susie Ibarra Brings Sky Islands to SUNY New Paltz

When Susie Ibarra takes the stage at SUNY New Paltz’s Studley Theater on March 10 at 7pm, she’ll be bringing one of the most talked-about pieces in contemporary music back to a community that helped it grow. Sky Islands—the piece that earned Ibarra the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Music—is the centerpiece of the Department of Music’s spring concert, performed by an expanded ensemble that bridges improvisation, composition, tradition, and experimentation. 

Born to Filipino immigrant parents and raised in Houston, Ibarra’s musical life began early and across vibrant traditions. She trained in piano as a child, gravitated toward percussion as a teen, and built a career that spans jazz, contemporary classical, traditional Philippine music, and experimental sound art. Her interdisciplinary approach includes composition, performance, sound mapping, multimedia work, and advocacy for Indigenous and environmental cultures. 

For Ibarra, Sky Islands began with a very specific kind of environment: high-altitude rainforests in Luzon, Philippines, known as sky islands for their ecological isolation. “These places are so remote that they say evolution has sped up a little faster,” she says. “You have all of these new species that don’t exist in other forest areas it’s really kind of magical.” That sense of wonder, she explains, was paired with rigorous listening and field research. “I love data. For my composition process, I always need some research time to collect the data of the area: the high-altitude rainforest sounds, the water sounds, what the trees sound like, obviously the species and birds. I love birds.” 

The work’s Pulitzer recognition reflects its ambition. The Pulitzer board cited Sky Islands for “challenging the notion of the compositional voice by interweaving the profound musicianship and improvisational skills of a soloist as a creative tool,” honoring the way it foregrounds the creative identities of the performers as much as the composer’s own. 

That collaborative spirit is central to Ibarra’s process. Sky Islands was written for Talking Gong, her trio with pianist Alex Peh and flutist Claire Chase, expanded here with percussionist Levy Lorenzo and the Bergamot String Quartet. “I’ve always been both composer and improviser,” she says. “I was a performer before I was a composer and I’m comfortable in the fact that these languages exist together.” Playing with musicians she knows deeply, she says, reshapes her sense of what the music can do. “There’s an aesthetic of composing music for people you know, that you have built musical relationships with. You get to write in a certain way, you get to perform in a certain way that you wouldn’t otherwise.” 

But the ensemble is more than a sum of individual voices, Ibarra emphasizes. “We’re not improvising with the intention that we wrote a salsa piece,” she says. “We’re improvising with the intention of what this score is. The composition is living in us. We breathe it, we live it.” That interplay—between structured score and free invention, between cultural memory and contemporary language—is part of what gives the piece its urgency and weight.

Sky Islands has had an extended life since its world premiere at New York’s Asia Society in July 2024. Ibarra says the piece continues to evolve with each performance. “The piece is just getting started. It stands there—the music is there, there’s a space for us to be able to sit in and deliver it, and it really has a life,” she says. Ibarra’s already received inquiries from universities interested in performing the work, and she welcomes the idea of hearing how others interpret it. “What will they play? What will it sound like? It’s great. We don’t even have to be there.” 

The March 10 concert also features Kingfisher and Sunbird, solo works performed by Peh and Chase, along with a new version of the Talking Gong trio repertoire. Together, the program underscores Ibarra’s ongoing exploration of sound as a way of mapping connections—between human and nonhuman, tradition and innovation, composition and community.

This article appears in March 2026.