Milwaukee composer, orchestrator, and sound designer Autumn Maria Reed has built a pretty impressive resume composing music for the Music Theatre of Madison, the Wisconsin Chamber Orchestra, KR Women’s Theatre, River Oaks Chamber Orchestra (ROCO), Brazil’s Orquestra Sinfônica Teatro Nacional Claudio Santoro (OSTNCS), the Chicago Philharmonic, and more.
She first got her start in music composition in the Madison area, growing up in Cottage Grove attending the Monona Grove School District and later Madison College. Elementary school is where a teacher helped inspire her to pursue a career in music.
“It always goes back to when I was in fourth-grade strings. My teacher, Maureen McCarty, gave us an assignment where we learned how to read the notes on the treble clef for violin and compose our own piece,” Reed tells Madison365. “Once I did that, I just really loved the experience. And my love for music grew from there.”
Reed remembers the award-winning animated sitcom The Simpsons as a musical inspiration in her young life, too.
“I always loved music primarily because I loved watching cartoons as a kid. I’m a huge fan of The Simpsons, and I quote them every single day,” Reed laughs. “The bulk of the music on The Simpsons was scored really by Alf Clausen and that orchestra, if I’m not mistaken. And he used a lot of mid-20th-century scoring techniques, in addition to the pop combo.”
In her composition work, Reed likes to orchestrate music using walls of sound — different timbres, each with their unique quirks harmonizing in unity. She tries to emulate the large, symphonic works of the Common Practice Period of Europe.
Reed was recently part of the National Women’s Music Festival Orchestra Ensemble, which celebrates the diversity of women’s musical expression through the presentation of works by women composers past and present. Reed was the winner of the Young Women of Color Composers Commission for the creation of a piece performed by the orchestra at the 50th National Women’s Music Festival at the Madison Marriott West Hotel in Middleton on July 4. The orchestra performed the world premiere of Reed’s beautiful piece “La Alborada de las Violetas.”
“I entered a competition, and was pleased to hear that I actually won, which is interesting because the music festival was in Middleton and it’s not terribly far from where I grew up,” she says. “Coincidentally, [Reed’s former Monona Grove violin teacher] Maria McCarty was actually scheduled to be in the women’s orchestra with me, but she had a family emergency that came up. That would have been a cool turn of events.”
Reed currently lives outside of Milwaukee but says she still spends time in Madison quite a bit. Since 2021, Reed has been a teaching artist for the Overture Center for the Arts in downtown Madison as part of the Lullaby Project, which was originally established by Carnegie Hall’s Weill Music Institute. The project helps expecting parents compose lullabies for their children and newborns and implements lesson plans to engage students in the creative process of making art
“With the Lullaby Project, it started at Carnegie Hall to help expecting parents write lullabies for their children,” says Reed, who is a graduate of the Berklee College of Music. “So, I consider myself to be a musical Swiss Army knife, except not much of a vocalist or lyricist, but I play all kinds of instruments and do a lot of home recordings in my home studio and deliver the deliverables to the parents, who are like our clients, and my coworkers, colleagues, and managers.”
A 2023 MUSE Mentorship participant, Reed has worked with Tony- and Grammy-nominated composer/orchestrator Zane Mark, according to her extensive musical bio, and she was also a composer awardee for Ravinia’s 2024 Breaking Barriers Festival, where the Chicago Philharmonic performed her piece under Maestra Nefeli Chadouli. Her orchestral works have been performed by numerous orchestras, notably River Oaks Chamber Orchestra (ROCO) and Brazil’s Orquestra Sinfônica Teatro Nacional Claudio Santoro (OSTNCS).
Reed has also collaborated with The Black String Triage Ensemble and the Black Diaspora Symphony Orchestra, led by Dayvin Hallmon, on works addressing social issues and trauma. This ensemble is featured in the PBS-distributed documentary Black Strings (2023).
“So both groups are committed to fostering community engagement, especially communities of color in Milwaukee, because Milwaukee is very segregated, and so there are a lot of shootings that happen. Unfortunately, two of my relatives have passed away in that manner,” Reed says. “So at the Black String Triage Ensemble, we play during the summer on the weekends, whenever there is a shooting or any type of civil unrest, as a way to keep peace.
“Now the Black Diaspora Symphony Orchestra, we have more scheduled concerts. We try to do things at the end of the year, like the annual children’s memorial concert in December, and then sometimes we’ll have like a Juneteenth concert,” she continues. “We did have a concert performance last May at the Bradley Symphony Center in Milwaukee as part of a community showcase. So on the program was some of my original work and works of Black composers.”
Beyond her work as a composer, Reed is an advocate for mental health awareness and has previously connected with the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI). Through her music and outreach, she hopes to “foster empathy, understanding, and patience for those who may be struggling with mental health challenges.”
“There still is a stigma of mental illness, and I have to be honest, it’s not all sunshine and roses. I think a lot of people like to think that they’re patient and understanding, and they’re quite frankly not,” Reed says. “As a person with mental health issues, I’m surrounded by a lot of people who, quite frankly, don’t understand. When it comes to mental health, I think it’s important to listen to people’s experiences, so that you can learn and just try to coexist with others.”
Reed says that her proudest work as a composer was “Mental Health Suite” performed live by the Wisconsin Chamber Orchestra in 2025 and conducted by Maestro Andrew Sewell during Concerts on the Square in front of the Wisconsin State Capitol.
“Mental Health Suite is four movements. It’s about various types of mental health disorders; the origin story is about childhood trauma. The persistent past is about depression. The fearful future is about anxiety, and then the last movement is about how we mask and try to go through the world pretending as if nothing happened,” Reed says. “I’ve learned that for a lot of people … we all put up a mask and try to act like everything’s okay, but it’s really not.”
Historically, Black women composers have been significantly underrepresented in the United States, particularly in classical music. Although the number of Black women composers has grown substantially in recent decades, it’s still rather small.
“To be honest, it’s still getting there. It’s very, very white and very male,” she admits. “There are some white males who still do have an issue with diversity because they see it as some sort of gimmick or cheating, and they just don’t understand.
“For me, I never really knew of any Black women composers until I read something in the newspaper about [jazz pianist, arranger, and composer] Mary Lou Williams when I was like 17. And then I felt like, ‘Oh, I can do that, too!’” she continues. “A lot of times people feel like classical music is not for them, but that is so wrong. It’s for everyone. How it has been presented in the past has made people feel like it doesn’t belong to them. I would like to think of my pieces as gateways to the classical world for people.”
Reed has also composed the score and songs for an upcoming musical documentary short film, Curio by Daytime Emmy-nominated Prof. Danielle Bainbridge. Much of Reed’s music is available to stream at Spotify under the name AMReed8.
“My goals moving forward are that I’m hoping to continue writing more music, especially more music that’s socially conscious and educational for kids,” she says. “I do want to do music that’s a little bit silly and humorous because again, I love The Simpsons. I love a lot of Disney movie musicals as well, and they have humor, animation, just all of that.
“I had an operetta with the Milwaukee Opera Theater called ‘Little Heart Warrior’ for a young boy that was born with a heart condition, and the music that I composed was set to animations that were based on this boy’s drawings,” she adds. “So it was amazing to see that come to life. I hope to do more of that moving forward with my career as a composer.”
