Composer Pamela Madsen often creates immersive, concert-length pieces and music dramas inspired by the environment, social change, poets and female innovators and explorers like scientist Marie Curie and pioneer Mary Hunter Austin. But earlier this year, Madsen instead looked inward, composing music influenced by her own experience with cancer and eventual feelings of hope and healing.
It was performed at South Coast Plaza in June as part of an event presented by City of Hope and Pacific Symphony in honor of National Cancer Survivor Month. Madsen, a two-time breast cancer survivor, also served as a guest speaker, sharing her story with the crowd. And, now, since October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, we share her story here.
Madsen, a Laguna Beach resident, is professor of music composition and theory at California State University, Fullerton. Her approximately seven-minute piece for the South Coast Plaza event was based on a poem by Emily Dickinson and includes three sections: “Let Me Not Mar That Perfect Dream,” “Finding Peace” and “Dare to Dream.”
“It was very healing,” she said of the composition. Madsen started with “Let Me Not Mar That Perfect Dream” and ended with a version of “Dare to Dream,” an earlier work written during her first cancer journey from 2007 to 2012. “Dare to Dream” originally premiered at Crystal Cove State Park for the opening of the Environmental Study Loop and was later reorchestrated for the South Orange County Orchestra’s premiere this past April. In between “Let Me Not Mar …” and “Dare to Dream,” she added a new section called “Finding Peace.”
“In every cancer journey, there’s this place where you realize, ‘Oh my God, I have cancer,’ and then realize, ‘You have to find peace in this.’ And then you have to dare to dream again. In this piece, I wrote a section, which is a repetitive loop of resonance that I feel great when I play and the players love to play it. And I say in the score, ‘Play until you find peace.’ It’s like a little meditation.”
Response to the piece was overwhelming. When Madsen reviewed the event recording later, she said, “there’s bells ringing … and applause forever, weeping in the audience – lots of connection.”
People have emailed her to request a recording of the piece so they can experience it again, Madsen said, adding that she wants to make an official recording and expand the composition with a vocal part to sing the chorus of “Let Me Not Mar That Perfect Dream.”
Her Cancer Journey
When Madsen learned she had cancer the first time, in 2007, she was on sabbatical and training for a triathlon. She started not feeling well and didn’t seem to be getting better.
Her primary care doctor ordered tests and discovered the cancer, she said. Madsen underwent surgery, chemotherapy and hormone therapy. After a 13-year remission, the cancer returned in 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic.
She had been on tour in Denmark for a residency at The Royal Danish Academy of Music through the American-Scandinavian Foundation. Her father was Danish, which fueled her interest in the area.
“I had a big piece in their giant hall there, and it was the last piece that was performed in Denmark before it was shut down for COVID,” Madsen recalled. “I came home kind of ragged feeling and … I just kept on not feeling well. I thought, ‘Oh, this is COVID.’ ”
But it wasn’t COVID, so she went back to the doctor to figure out what was going on. It was a recurrence of the cancer. Driving to City of Hope in Duarte for treatment, Madsen went through surgery again, radiation and continued long-term hormone therapy to block it from coming back. Madsen explained that she couldn’t undergo chemotherapy because she had received the maximum amount of chemo allowed the first time around.
Reflecting on how she felt when she got the news that it was cancer again, she said, “It was not scary … because I knew there was treatment.”
It was more of an inconvenience because her career was in high gear by this point. And the pandemic was raging all around.
“The world was in a state of healthcare doom … and you couldn’t even find a hospital bed to get surgery done, so it was a lot of negotiating with the medical system at that time,” she said. “That was arduous, but I had great doctors at City of Hope and in Orange County that really paid attention and really looked at how best I could heal.”
While grateful to be alive, some of the cancer drugs caused neuropathy – as often happens – and affected her ability to play piano. “My hands got very wooden and would not play at all,” she said. Though it improved over time, Madsen still has reduced feeling in her fingertips. She no longer performs her own music publicly; her piano playing falls below the high standards she sets. However, that doesn’t keep Madsen from continuing to compose and direct other musicians. They breathe life into the pieces she writes.
She has enough facility back in her hands to play piano at home or to demonstrate, but not quite at the level she would like for a concert performance. To heal herself, she began playing “Luminous Etudes,” designed to reconnect the nerve endings in the hand. These are studies for the piano that she wrote during a residency at Montserrat monastery in Spain, home to the Black Madonna, which many believe has healing powers.
“People come from miles and miles to touch the hand of the Black Madonna to be healed,” Madsen said. “So, I went there and I was composer in residence with the monks and learned the rituals and styles of their music, and I wrote this piece, ‘Luminous Etudes.’
It’s a very methodical connection of nerve endings to brain, Madsen explained, adding that her piece is being played a lot now because of its healing ability for those who have suffered a stroke, for example. “Luminous Etudes” have been premiered by pianists Kathleen Supové and Eleonor Sandresky in New York City and performed/toured by pianist and UCLA professor Inna Faliks, who may soon record the piece and has commissioned additional healing etudes.
City of Hope recently published its own story about Pamela Madsen, who was one of the cancer center’s patients. To read that story on City of Hope’s website, visit https://www.cityofhope.org/locations/orange-county/blog/daring-to-dream-again-breast-cancer-story.
Birth of a Musician
Originally from New Jersey, Madsen came to California for college at UC San Diego, backpacking and hitchhiking across the country. Already immersed in music, she began composing at 8 or 9 to earn a badge in Girl Scouts and started playing piano even earlier, at 5 years old.
Music ran in the family: Her father was also a pianist and even continued playing after losing his hearing while fighting in the Battle of the Bulge during World War II, relying on his memory and feeling the sound reverberate through the piano. So Madsen also learned to play by feeling those vibrations. “He was my inspiration,” she said.
Madsen’s father also encouraged her musicianship at a young age by taking her to a performance of his female piano teacher, Grace Castagnetta, who was a pianist, composer and arranger of Gershwin pieces.
“(She) would say to the audience, ‘Give me pitches – four pitches,’ and then she would magically improvise. So I thought, ‘Oh, that’s a fun job.’ ”
Madsen began to compose all the time, improvising at the piano herself. In high school, Madsen wrote her first big piece based on poet T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” and “The Hollow Men.” Located in Wayne, New Jersey, her school was just outside New York City and her teachers were from Juilliard.
“So I had a really kind of idyllic education … and I didn’t think anything of being a woman composer because I just composed, I conducted. I had pieces for orchestra, pieces for every ensemble,” Madsen said.
She went on to attend Indiana University, the top music school at the time. She also attended Yale University for doctoral studies in music theory and UCSD for her Ph.D. in music composition. Trained in both piano and voice, Madsen has served as a concert pianist, accompanist and coach in addition to her composing, directing and teaching work.
While music fills her life, Madsen struggles to put into words exactly what she loves about it.
“It’s hard to say because I’m so ingrained in it,” she said, adding that her husband, Eric Dries, is also a musician, a jazz pianist, and a music professor at CSUF. “So we’re 24/7 music.” Their home, set against the canyon in Laguna, is complete with two grand pianos and two music studios – one for each of them. “We both compose and we both teach at Fullerton. So I’m surrounded by music all the time,” she added.
“It’s sort of hard to define what you do if you do it all the time. I think I was attracted to it because I couldn’t help myself. The music was just resounding in my ears and I thought, ‘I have to write it down.’
“I just hear it, and then I have to write it. And I realized, ‘This is not any music that I’m hearing by anyone else. It’s totally different.’ So I kept on writing it down. I wake up in the morning – this is my composition time. Usually, I compose till noon. And I write and I write and I write. And I just really am kind of obsessed with it in a way.”
As most creatives do, Madsen writes about what inspires her.
“I live up against the canyon, so it’s very quiet. I have a big pine tree in my yard, and the sounds of the wind and the birds and all the critters and the environment influences me,” she said. “I often go on residencies to remote places to compose, and I live in Laguna, so I go down to the ocean every night at the end of my day to walk at sunset and I take lots of photos.”
Madsen explained that her practice sits at the intersection of image, music, text and the environment.
“I began as a pianist and performer, and the physical reality of sound – breath, resonance, time and endurance – has always shaped how I compose. I think of music-making as a disciplined practice: attention, stamina and the ability to sustain meaning over long spans of time.”
Her multimedia collaborations include work with Laguna Beach-based IMAX filmmaker Greg MacGillivray, Arctic photographer Camille Seaman, video artists Quintan Ana Wikswo and Jimena Sarno, and visual artist/activist Judy Chicago.
“Over time, my projects became increasingly place-based and interdisciplinary,” Madsen said. “I learned to begin not only in my studio, but on-site: walking, listening, recording, reading and mapping the emotional and ecological character of a location. This method shaped my environmental works and my belief that music can function as public service and arts advocacy.”
For example, “There Will Come Soft Rains” emerged from living on the edge of the fire zone in Southern California and addresses water, drought and the meaning of rain through a concert-length multimedia form.
Music composer Pamela Madsen in Joshua Tree. Photo courtesy of Eric Dries 
Composer Pamela Madsen at UCross in Wyoming, where she served a residency. Photo courtesy of UCross Foundation 
Two-time breast cancer survivor Pamela Madsen addresses the crowd at a June event in honor of National Cancer Survivor Month, presented by City of Hope and Pacific Symphony at South Coast Plaza. Madsen’s music composition, inspired by her experience with cancer, was performed at the event. Photo courtesy of City of Hope Orange County 
Pamela Madsen at a “Ghosts of Laguna” concert that included her composition, presented by Opera Laguna. Photo courtesy of Eric Dries
Meaningful Music
Madsen estimates that she has composed more than 200 pieces in her lifetime and has long asked: How can music make us listen differently?
“That question has led me from chamber music, which is what I played, to these immersive concert-length projects,” she said. “I write these big, epic pieces that are 90 minutes long that ask the audience to go into my environmental world and experience it. And then I also do research-driven music dramas that treat listening as sort of an ethical act that is going to change the world in some way.”
She has a commitment to women’s voices, as a composer, pianist, director and advocate, because there are not many female composers. Her operas often highlight “forgotten women in history.”
Madsen also has completed a lot of works that invite the audience to share her past experiences like “going into places which are devastated, that have drought or fire or environmental concerns.”
“I do archival research on that area – as well as the poets I interface with, or writers or scientists. I’ve done operas on Marie Curie, and I’ve actually been at her lab and researched,” Madsen said. “I do site-specific works that impact change.”
After recovering from her last bout of cancer, Madsen became prolific in her writing – one opus after another – because she decided there was no time to lose. The reminder of our looming mortality lit a fire under Madsen to create.
“It did change my perspective because I thought this was the last time I’m ever going to write anything,” she said.
She wrote the epic, 90-minute-long “Oratio for the Earth,” a Los Angeles Audience Choice Awards winner in 2021-22. She also wrote another 90-minute, three-act, multimedia opera, “Why Women Went West,” funded by Opera America and the National Endowment for the Arts, in 2022-23.
In 2024, she followed up with “Fragments From the Wasteland,” a multimovement set of works for chamber ensembles based on T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland.” Then, she composed “Ye Arch Beach Tavern” for Opera Laguna’s “Ghosts of Laguna” concerts in October 2024 and 2025, and she wrote “In America: Modjeska” in 2025.
“And that was in short succession,” she said. “Then I was commissioned by the city of Laguna Beach to write the ‘Laguna Beach Suite’ …. I wrote these concert-length pieces one after the other. I just kept on going, and I took on the commissions because I thought, ‘Well, this is it. Better do them now.’ If I only have a certain amount of time in my life, these works should be written.”
With that in mind, while Madsen is working on recording and celebrating all of her past pieces, she is more interested in writing new compositions to add to her legacy than focusing on what’s already been completed. “I just love writing new music, and if it’s been premiered, yeah, somebody could play it again. But I’m actually interested in the next new work,” she said.
She is currently working on an album of music from her opera, “Why Women Went West,” to be released sometime in the 2026-27 season by L.A.-based Brightwork newmusic’s label. A recording of “There Will Come Soft Rains” (2018) is also planned to be released in 2027-28.
Another project is called “Starry Adventure: The Optic of Enchantment – Retuning the West,” which unites her commitments to women’s voices, environmental inquiry, archival research and advanced tuning practice. This will culminate in a major Los Angeles performance with Partch Ensemble, Brightwork newmusic and HEX vocal ensemble at REDCAT, a smaller theater within the Walt Disney Concert Hall, in June 2028 to coincide with the start of the Los Angeles Olympics.
“Starry Adventure” is based on Madsen’s archival research into the devastation of the West and influenced by her own westward trip as a young woman as well as her experience hiking, backpacking and observing the changes to our environment through the years.
While conducting research at The Huntington Library in San Marino, Madsen came across a short book titled “The Land of Little Rain” by Mary Hunter Austin, which was written 120 years ago about California and the Eastern Sierra region where she traveled.
“I wrote my opera about her coming west,” Madsen said. “She came west because, at that time, in the early 20th century, women could own property and homesteads in California. If you ran across the misfortune of being divorced or your husband dying, you were destitute. She came and she was able to find her own way and be a writer amongst all the famous writers of that time. And my opera is about her autonomy, finding her way in the West. Sort of my story, in a way, too.
“In my opera, I focus on the tragedy and perseverance: Her child was born with severe defects and she had to give up her child. The opera is about … the hardship of that in order to keep on going and survive.”
At The Huntington, Madsen also found Austin’s last book, called “Starry Adventure,” which has inspired her follow-up opera of the same name.
“It’s a book that talks about this kind of magical realization of the world as this adventure, and sort of the primary idea of the environment being this special place that was different. She had done a lot of work on trying to identify what the West was and also to find her place in society as a woman.”
The opera is about her meeting with photographer Ansel Adams in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in the late 1920s to collaborate on his first book about Taos Pueblo, which included Adams’ first photos in the stark, black-and-white style for which he became known. Notably, Madsen traveled to that area as a composer in residence at the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation in Taos and Women’s International Study Center in Santa Fe.
Madsen’s opera, “Starry Adventure,” is the next step in the arc of her work about Austin. “It’s an opera that treats landscape as protagonist, listening as responsibility and women’s creative autonomy as a force that cannot be contained by image, myth or history,” she said.
The opera was commissioned by Partch Ensemble, she said.
“Harry Partch was an iconoclast who lived in the deserts of that region as well, a little bit later, who developed all these instruments that replicated the sound of the desert and this kind of tuning,” Madsen said. “He’s passed away, but his instruments are really unique. They are cloud bowls and the Boo (a set of bamboo tubes) … and different tunings of instruments that make these kind of percussion sounds … like the desert winds. If you listen to nature, nature does not sound like our scale – it sounds all in between …. so it’s tuned microtonally.”
As Madsen explained, “Since it is this kind of starry adventure – about the Optic of Enchantment – we’re trying to have it programmed as one of the offshoots of the Olympic cultural year as well because I have such strong ties to the ‘dare to dream’ adventure of the Olympics.”
Her daughter, Annika Dries, won an Olympic gold medal with the U.S. water polo team in 2012; Annika was also recently named to the USA Water Polo Hall of Fame.
Closer to home, Madsen has also been commissioned by the South Orange County Orchestra to write a piece about Laguna Beach for the group’s “Love Laguna” concert on July 10, 2027, at Laguna Playhouse.
“It’s so wonderful to write the piece because I’m writing it in the environment where it was inspired and then it will be played in that environment,” Madsen said.
Inspiring Others
Writing mostly in the mornings, Madsen composes at the piano and hand notates on large manuscript paper to create a musical score. Calling upon deep listening skills she learned, Madsen often hears music in her dreams that leads to many of her compositions. Madsen worked with the late Pauline Oliveros, an influential composer and musician who created the philosophy and practice of deep listening, and became certified in this practice.
“You focus on hearing music, and inner hearing and outer hearing,” she explained. “With inner hearing, you hear and then you manifest that. People practice this to get that focus, and also listening to your imagination and your dreams, so you remember them. So I wake up in the morning full of ideas, and I have to write them down.”
Now she teaches deep listening to her own students at Cal State Fullerton. She feels compelled to share her knowledge to help others excel in their own music compositions. And she’s director of the New Music Ensemble, which includes about 20 to 30 composers and improvisers, and curates the New Music Series and InterArts Collaborative Projects, all at the Fullerton campus.
“I’m a composer, historian, theorist and archivist, and I think what I’m giving is a thread that should continue. And so I teach how to open up students to ideas and carry on. In my practice of teaching, I also say it’s not only that you compose music, but you also create an environment so that music will continue.
“I’m a producer of works and I’m also a funder of works and I create an infrastructure with an ensemble and performances so that works can continue. And so my students then create their own ensembles, their own orchestras, their own works.”
EVENT DETAILS
Performance of Pamela Madesen’s Pieces with Quarteto Nuevo
Quarteto Nuevo will premiere Madsen’s piece, “Lost Borders: The Walking Woman,” and also perform her “57 Buzzards / Water Trails of the Ceriso” from “The Land of Little Rain Suite”; the group is co-directed by Madsen and her husband, Eric Dries.
When: 8 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 17
Where: Meng Concert Hall at CSU Fullerton, 800 N. State College Blvd., Fullerton
Tickets: $10 general admission or $8 for CSUF and other students, seniors age 62 and older, military members, CSUF staff and faculty, and members of the CSUF Alumni Association and Osher Lifelong Learning Institute. Minimum age is 4 years old and a ticket is required; no babes in arms allowed.
More Info: quartetonuevo.com, pamelamadsenmusic.com
In addition to encouraging others to pursue music, Madsen’s experience with cancer – and her husband’s own journey with colon cancer at a young age – inspired their daughter to pursue a career in medicine after her success at the Olympics.
Annika Dries attended Stanford University for both her undergraduate work and medical school. She’s now an attending hospitalist and a clinical instructor at UCLA, while also continuing research in cardiology and genetics.
Although she was inspired by her parents’ experiences with cancer, Annika’s “incredible dedication to her dreams” was also the source of inspiration for one of Madsen’s compositions, “Dare to Dream.” And Madsen was influenced by one of Eleanor Roosevelt’s famous quotes, “The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.”
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