Laura Jobin-Acosta
COMPOSER • SOPRANO • NEW YORK
"Jobin-Acosta's music bestowed an ease and vivacity...easily accessible" - Washington Post
Laura Jobin-Acosta is of Indian heritage, raised in a Puerto Rican and American family, and has spent her life — and her entire compositional portfolio — exploring the musical voice that lives in her DNA.
That search has taken her from Hindustani music in college to South India to study Carnatic music at its source, from Spanish and Latin liturgy to the nearly extinct Coptic language, from the poetry of the Harlem Renaissance to poems written by girls in a Honduran orphanage. Every piece she writes is another step in that exploration: music made from the in-between place, for anyone who has ever lived there.
Laura grew up between languages, between liturgies, between musical worlds — and she has never stopped writing from that place. Her music tries to make people feel less alone, more seen, and more alive to beauty. She is not interested in novelty for its own sake. She is interested in what speaks truth.
RECENT & NOTABLE WORKS
CHORAL • 30 MIN
Sometimes I Wonder
Chamber oratorio in English and Spanish, setting poems by girls from an orphanage in Honduras. Soprano soloist, SSAATTBB choir, percussion, piano, guitar, cello.
Commissioned by Choral Chameleon, 2025
OPERA • 20 MIN
A Way Forward
A short opera following three generations of a Mexican family confronting foreclosure — and each other.
Commissioned by Washington National Opera, 2024.
ORCHESTRAL • 7 MIN
Tree Bees
Full orchestra. Workshopped 2024. Available for performance — score and parts on request.
2fl (2nd dbl A Fl), 2ob, 2cl, 2bn ·
4hn, 3tpt, 3tbn, tuba · timp, 2perc · strings
PRESS
"Jobin-Acosta's score distinctively shades each character... dulcet bass vocal lines being notably melodious."
"The choir was performing a new song in Coptic — a language nearly extinct except in liturgy. It is very unusual to have new art in Coptic."