Michael Stubblefield

Education

DMA, The Hartt School, University of Hartford

MA, California State University, East Bay

BA, California State University, East Bay

Michael Stubblefield (b. 1989) is an American composer, guitarist, and music educator based in Hartford, Connecticut. His primary composition teachers include Robert Carl, David Macbride, Ken Steen, Jeffrey Miller, Frank La Rocca, Daniel Highman, Owen Lee, and Mark Alburger. Michael has also had additional studies, domestic and international, with Zae Munn, Joshua Marquez, Ingrid Stötzel, Evan Chambers, Payton MacDonald, Ofer Ben-Amotts, Jan Jisarek, and Kyung-Mee Rhee. Michael has also studied classical guitar with Christopher Ladd, Marc Teicholz, and Mark Simons, piano with Bruce Cook and Virginia Bigelow, and voice with Timothy Gary.

As a composer, his musical influences range from early Renaissance music to 20th century experimental music to heavy metal to non-western traditions. He has worked with the Redshift Ensemble, the Cygnus Ensemble, the Tenebrae New Music Ensemble, the New Jersey Percussion Ensemble, the Hartt Orchestra, the Hartt Composers Ensemble, the Opus Project Ensemble, guitarist Alex Aldridge, cellist Benjamin Stayner, pianist Feona Lee Jones, and many more. Performances of his music have happened across the San Francisco Bay, New England, and international performances in South Korea and Germany. Michael has frequently attended the International Summer Academy of Music (ISAM) in Ochsenhausen, Germany, where he won First Prize in the Josef Dorfman Memorial Composition Competition for his piece The Sludge Dirge in August, 2023. Michael's music is published through ASCAP.

In addition to composing, Michael has also enjoyed a variety of performance experiences, having been a member of heavy metal bands, choirs, acoustic guitar ensembles, and new music ensembles. Highlights include singing in Fukuoka, Japan with the California State University Singers in 2014 and performing bass guitar with the new music group, The Opus Project Ensemble from 2013-2017. Michael is also the conductor and music director of the Connecticut Guitar Guild Guitar Ensemble.

Born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, Michael is currently working throughout New England in a variety of music related activities, as a composer, a private teacher in guitar, bass, piano, ukulele, voice, composition, and music theory, The Hartt School as an administrative assistant, and teaches music history and appreciation courses at Tunxis Community College in Farmington, Connecticut.

Michael's interests outside of music include animals (especially snakes), movies, reading, hiking, cooking, the San Francisco Giants and 49ers, and coffee, and is a proud snake dad to Zorro, Klio, and Mirabel.