Ep. 045 - Building Community and Finding Balance in Music with Nicky Sohn

On today’s episode of music/Maker with Tyler Kline, Tyler is joined by composer Nicky Sohn.

Nicky's music is jazz-inflected and rhythmically driven, with vivid, colorful orchestration that tends to win over a room. Her work spans orchestral, chamber, ballet, and vocal repertoire, and has been performed by the St. Louis Symphony, the Minnesota Orchestra, the National Orchestra of Korea, and many others. Recent highlights include a sold-out Guitar Concerto No. 1 with the Albany Symphony featuring guitarist Bokyung Byun — later presented at the 2025 Tanglewood Music Festival — a large-scale ballet for BalletCollective premiered at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, and Galaxy Back to You for the Balourdet Quartet, featured on their debut album. This season brings three new orchestral premieres with the Atlanta Symphony, the Knoxville Symphony, and Orchestra Lumos.

In this conversation, Nicky traces her path from an early piano start to a pivotal turn toward composition, through burnout, a reset in Berlin, and a supportive chapter at Rice/Houston. She and Tyler talk about community as the engine of her practice, storytelling drawn from Korean folktales, and writing with broader listenability in mind. Nicky also shares how a love of jazz shapes her sense of motion and harmony, and how a weekday “9–5” routine, boundaries, and life outside music have brought balance—and new brightness—to her work.

Learn more about Nicky and hear her music at https://www.nickysohn.com/.

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