Nicholas Edwards is an American composer hailing from North Carolina and currently living in Scottsdale, Arizona. His works showcase a blend of influences, paying homage to western music history, his Ecuadorian heritage, and most of all, the wonders of the natural world. Through these diverse inspirations, he hopes that his music might serve as a point of connection between himself, performers, listeners, and the incredible world that surrounds us.

Edwards received his undergraduate degree from Vanderbilt University, where he completed a double major in Composition and Ecology/Evolution/Organismal Biology. Composition mentors include Michael A. Rose, Michael Slayton, Molly Herron, Stan Link, and pre-university, John Allemeier. He currently studies privately with David Conte, and has participated in masterclasses with composers such as Jessie Montgomery, Sarah Kirkland Snider, Ricardo Zohn-Muldoon, and Texu Kim. During his degree, Edwards founded and conducted a chamber orchestra which premiered over an hour of the composer’s new orchestral works across multiple semesters; conducting mentors include Robin Fountain, Thomas Verrier, and Tucker Biddlecombe.

In summer 2024, Edwards will be joining the Fairbanks Summer Arts Festival’s Composing in the Wilderness program (Denali National Park, AK), the Emerging Composers Intensive at Hidden Valley (Carmel Valley, CA) and the Saratoga Orchestra’s Pacific Northwest Conducting Institute. Previously, he attended the Ball State Bands Conducting Workshop, received Vanderbilt’s 2023 Sue Brewer Award, attended the 2022 European American Musical Alliance’s Summer Composition Institute in Paris, France, received the Symphony Guild of Charlotte’s 2019 Anniversary Scholarship, and won the 2018 Project 21 Composition Competition. Collaboration is central to the composer’s practice, and he’s grateful to have received commissions from several colleagues.

The composer’s love for nature inspires the majority of his works. Representative pieces include Seven Birds of Aotearoa, a work for solo cello written after endangered and extinct birds endemic to New Zealand, Alpen Concerto, a 48-minute piano concerto premiered in December 2022 and born from a trip to the Austrian Alps, and the forthcoming piece Angels Landing for clarinet and piano whose themes were written atop the eponymous rock formation in Zion National Park. The music seeks to honor (rather than imitate) nature with the hope of inviting performers and listeners into the human emotions that surround a natural subject.

Edwards is proud to have performed research in the Zwiebel Lab while at Vanderbilt, studying the chemosensory regulation of behavior in eusocial ants. Publications can be found in the scientific journals BMC Biology and Insects.