Chloe Biggs is a 20-year-old composer who experiments with modern sounds to try to imagine a future through music.  Her exposure to pop songs on the radio and orchestral scores in film and games sparked an obsession with music when she was a child.  She fell in love with the classical canon through her training as a violinist with Kristen Presley in grade school.  Her first compositions drew inspiration from beloved symphonic composers like Mahler, Stravinsky, and Shostakovich whom she studied in the school orchestra and the Richmond Symphony Youth Orchestra Program.  In high school, she studied composition with Hope Armstrong Erb who helped her expand her musical horizons and build the tools to pursue a career in music. 

She was commissioned by CMSCVA for the first time in her senior year of high school for Our Pictures.  Excited by the potential of the many instruments on offer, she composed Picture of a Blooming City (2023) for mixed ensemble, a piece about Richmond’s trees heavily inspired by Stravinsky’s symphonic magnum opus, The Rite of Spring.

She is currently enrolled in her third year of undergraduate composition studies at Oberlin Conservatory with Soomin Kim.  She had her first orchestra piece, Body (2025), read this November at OC by conductor Raphael Jiménez.  Her recent work has drawn from newer composers such as Steve Reich and Wendy Carlos as well as modern edm, pop, rap, and punk music.  She enjoys exploring live electronic processing, synthesized sounds, and improvisation such as in her composition, Bucket Music (2025), with Indigo Brandstein and Gwen R. Reberneck-McKee and her arrangement of Brandstein’s Why I Stopped Meditating and Started Screaming (2025) for chamber ensemble and fixed media.