Sabrina Peña Young is an American composer and percussionist.
Early life
Young grew up in South Florida, the daughter of Dominican and Cuban parents. She spent her early years performing in orchestras, alternative bands, and avant-garde ensembles. Young started playing percussion at the age of 10. Young is a third-generation musician. Her grandmother was a professional opera singer in Cuba. Her mother was an amateur pianist, and father was an engineer. Her sister also became a musician and played piano. Both practiced long hours as children. Young's childhood home emphasized music, practice, and hard work.
Career
While at the University of South Florida in 2000, Young joined SYCOM (Systems Complex for the Recording and Performing Arts). In college she studied under Dr. Clare Shore and Paul Reller. She worked at Atlantic Productions under Emmy-Winning Director Charles Lyman as a student at University of South Florida in Tampa.
Young received the American Music Centers CAP grant for the multimedia percussion work World Order #5 in 2008. Young is a prolific author on new music, and published in SAI Panpipes, Percussive Notes, Notations 21, the IAWM Journal, the SEAMUS Music Journal, the Kapralova Society, and other music publications.
Her futuristic multimedia oratorio Creation won the New Genre Award from the International Alliance for Women in Music in 2011. Collaborations included writing the film score for Emmy-Winning Animator Rob Cabrera, the interactive opera The Village with UK composer Lee Scott, and the director Sean Fleck's Americana. In 2015 Young published her debut novel Libertaria: Genesis as an addendum to her online work Libertaria:The Virtual Opera.
Her multimedia works have been performed at the Beijing Conservatory, the International Computer Music Conference, Project Greenlight, the Athena Festival, the New York International Independent Film Festival, Art Basel Miami, Turkey's Cinema for Peace, and Pulsefield International Exhibition of Sound Art. Young is a member of the New York Women Composer’s Association, the International Alliance for Women in Music, and the Buffalo Movie and Video Makers.
In 2021 Young's Libertaria Cycle was released as part of the Grammy-Nominated classical album series Sonidos Cubanos. The album included work by Tania Leon, Ileana Perez Velazquez, Orlando Jacinto Garcia, and Sergio Barroso. In 2022 Young joined the Board of the International Alliance for Women in Music.
Film and media
Young has been in forty film productions as composer, director, writer, or crew. In 2005 Young's World Order #2 was premiered at Gürşat Özdamar's Cinema for Peace in Turkey, where 100 filmmakers presented 100 short films on "Peace". World Order #2 was the second in a series of new media and musical works about war and its effects on society.
An advocate for women composers, Young curated 2011 and 2012 Athena 60x60 Mix with Vox Novus director Robert Voisey. The 60x60 Athena mix contains 60 one-minute works form 60 different female composers. Her video for the 2011 60x60 Athena mix to creates a multimedia performance containing 60 one-minute audio works from women composers accompanied with video.
Young's work Creation won the New Genre Prize from the 2011 International Alliance for Women in Music Search for New Music.
In 2013 Young released Libertaria: The Virtual Opera, a 55-minute machinima movie with original script, soundtrack and animated visuals created by Young. The title "Virtual Opera" refers to the fact that there were no real-world rehearsals and the cast contributed their recordings from around the world via the internet. The movie can be viewed online, and there is an accompanying soundtrack recording and novelisation available. Libertaria:The Virtual Opera was screened at New York City's Opera America in 2015. The score of Libertaria:The Virtual Opera is a combination of traditional musical theater/opera, electroacoustic music, and jazz. Critics have called the production "groundbreaking" and "Wagner 2.0." The opera cast included Joe Cameron, Perry R. Cook, Gracia Gillund, Jennifer Hermansky, Matthew Meadows, Kate Sikora, Gretchen Suarez-Pena and Yvette Teel.
Young presented a TEDx Talk at TedxBuffalo in 2014 in Buffalo, New York, on "Singing geneticists and EPIC cyberspace machinima operas." In 2014 Young presented Libertaria at the Women Composers Festival at Hartford, speaking on virtual opera production and internet collaboration. and the WNY Women in Arts Festival in Buffalo, New York.