“There is a deep interiority to this music . . . Worthington has an instantly recognizable sound, an austere sensuality not quite like anyone else . . . a composer of considerable imagination, emotional expressiveness, and poetic sensibility.” – American Record Guide
“She has the ability to state her compositional case to us directly, as it were, in absolutely concrete if mystical terms. She somehow makes clear to us how we experience the transitional, impermanent and ever shifting quality of a later modernist world.” – Gapplegate Classical-Modern Music Reviews
Self-taught in composition, Rain says impulses for new pieces have ranged from the sounds of “NYC garbage trucks backing up late in the night, to the two-note expression of a sigh, to a dream of a careening bike ride through dark fog.”
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Performances of Rain Worthington’s compositions have spanned the globe from Brazil to Iceland to Armenia, with premieres in Tokyo, Oxford University, and Delhi Music Society in India. Her work takes “. . . ideas of American musical style to a new place – like a walk in a familiar, yet very different park” – Chamber Music magazine. Her catalog includes works for orchestra, mixed chamber ensembles, violin duo, solo marimba and even a miniature for oud.
With a strong childhood memory of Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring,” an affinity for Satie’s piano music, and a love the allure of Middle-Eastern modal music that led her to travels in Greece, Egypt and Turkey, Rain has always followed her own musical instincts. She first began composing solo piano pieces, before learning music notation, and performed her works from memory in fellow artists’ lofts in Soho and at The Kitchen. With the downtown NYC club scene serving as her conservatory, Worthington led two bands and performed at CBGB’s, the Pyramid, Roulette, and PS 122.
Inspired by the energy of the contemporary classical scene, she pursued her fascination with orchestral music and taught herself notation and orchestration. Her orchestral writing has been described in the IAWM Journal as “a fusion of styles—ancient, medieval sounds expressed via modality and open sonorities, modernist minimalist ostinato, and classical approaches to basic ideas—to capture components of the human experience.”
In 2016 Navona Records released Worthington’s solo CD of orchestral works Dream Vapors – selected works for orchestra to critical acclaim. She was a guest composer at Missouri State University 2016 and 2017 for two MSU Symphony premieres of her orchestral works, “Tracing a Dream,” and “In Passages.” PARMA Recordings recorded “In Passages” in October 2017 with Croatian conductor, Miran Vaupotić. In 2018, Maestro Claudio Scimone directed “I Solisti Veneti” for the Italian premiere of In Passages, March 2018. Upcoming orchestral performances include a South American premiere of In Passages at V Encontro Internacional de Cordas Festival in Brazil.
(The composer has directed that all proceeds from the purchase of the Dream Vapors album to be donated through PARMA Recordings to the Cure Alzheimer’s Fund (a research 501(c)(3) public charity).