San Francisco-based composer Patricia Wallinga connects audiences with unheard stories, voices, and ideas of the modern world. Her intricate, charismatic music engages with traditions from literature, dance, theater, and folk music alongside influences from the classical canon. Her work has earned praise as “quite powerful” by the Bloomington Herald-Times and “damn brilliant” by conductor and composer Eric Whitacre.
Wallinga is particularly fond of vocal chamber music, a genre where she has earned notable early-career accolades. She won a 2015 BMI Student Composer Award for her first song cycle, Dreams in War Time, and was named a finalist for the National Association of Teachers of Singing 2019 Art Song Composition Award for her 2018 cycle The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. In June 2025, Wallinga's chamber opera The Sisters (based on the poetry of Amy Lowell, Sappho, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Emily Dickinson) premiered with Philadelphia-based opera company Liberty City Arts. Other highlights of Wallinga’s career include residency as a composer fellow at the Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy of Music in collaboration with the Del Sol String Quartet and a 2023 project reimagining Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel’s Sonata in G Minor as a piano concerto (in collaboration with pianist Sharon Su).
As a mezzo-soprano/alto specializing in contemporary choral repertoire, Wallinga is proud to join the performer-composer tradition and considers her years of experience on both voice and double bass an essential influence on her work. Memorable performances include those at Carnegie Hall with Indiana University’s elite contemporary vocal ensemble NOTUS, part of a tour both in New York City and the American Choral Directors Association National Conference in Salt Lake City. Wallinga currently sings with the International Orange Chorale, a San Francisco-based choral ensemble specializing in contemporary classical music.
Wallinga believes in change through activism and speaking truth to power. With her equally acerbic and insightful online presence via Bluesky (and formerly Twitter), she has channeled this belief to grow into one of the field’s most active advocates against the structural inequalities of classical and new music. Her online advocacy and wit, featured in the Boston Globe, Rolling Stone, and I Care If You Listen, has made her a recognizable figure in online classical and new music communities.
Originally from Naperville, Illinois, Wallinga holds degrees in composition from Indiana University and San Francisco Conservatory of Music. Her notable teachers include Elinor Armer, Sven-david Sandström, Aaron Travers, Claude Baker, and Don Freund. In her free time, she enjoys playing double bass with the Awesöme Orchestra Collective and being the least cool person in the audience for her sister's heavy metal band.