Emma Cardon-Wake

Emma Cardon-Wake is a composer and harpsichordist originally from Logan, Utah. Her music has been performed and premiered by a wide range of ensembles, including the Fry Street Quartet, Moon Unit Duo, 3D Percussion, the American Festival Chorus and Orchestra, the Caine Undergraduate Research Quartet, and the Utah State University Symphony Orchestra.

Emma has participated in numerous summer programs and festivals, including the Cortona Sessions for New Music, the Emerging Composers Intensive at Hidden Valley, New Music on the Point, the EAMA Summer Music Institute, the Boston University Tanglewood Institute, and the Brevard Music Center. She has been recognized as an MTNA Composition Young Artist National 2nd place winner, an ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Awards winner, a NFMC National winner and recipient of the Olga Klein Nelson Award, and a multiple-year National YoungArts Foundation merit winner.

Emma earned her Bachelor of Music in Composition with a minor in Harpsichord Performance from Vanderbilt University’s Blair School of Music in 2021. During her undergraduate studies, she provided harpsichord continuo for the university’s baroque ensemble for three years. She received her Master of Music in Composition from the Cleveland Institute of Music in 2023, where she was awarded the Donald Erb Prize in Composition and the Isada-Stillman-Varma Award in Music Theory.

Emma is currently completing her Doctorate in Composition at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music. While at IU, Emma taught music theory and aural skills for three years as an Associate Instructor and served on the faculty of both the Jacobs Composition Academy and the Jacobs Composition Academy Summer Intensive. Her primary composition teachers during her doctoral studies were P.Q. Phan, Gabriel Jenks, and Aaron Travers. In 2025, she was awarded the Georgina Joshi Composition Commission Award, through which she is composing a new work for the Indiana University New Music Ensemble, to be premiered in April 2026.

Emma is excited to be joining the Utah State University community as a composition instructor.