A MacDowell fellowship—a fully funded artistic residency in New Hampshire—is the dream of thousands of multidisciplinary artists each year, and in 2025, that came true for SFCM Composition alum Taylor Joshua Rankin.

“The whole ethos of the place, of the spirit of MacDowell, is that you are here as an artist, and so you don’t need to worry about day-to-day chores, or prepping food, or cooking, or doing the laundry, or family commitments,” Rankin says. “They give you the space and time to work on your craft, whatever that means to you.”

A percussion major as an undergrad, Rankin won a composition master’s degree scholarship to SFCM, where he studied under Mason Bates. He maintained a busy schedule as a freelance percussionist in and around the Bay Area for years before deciding to focus on composition, but he also worked for the San Francisco Symphony as an editor, where he contributed to GRAMMY-nominated recordings like Nico Muhly’s Throughline.

“Taylor's extensive background as a percussionist, and his hungry curiosity for new music, have given his compositions a special originality and urgency,” Bates says. “He's known to be a phenomenal colleague and stellar human being as well, and I'm sure he charmed everyone at MacDowell!”

The MacDowell program was the initiative of composer Edward MacDowell and his wife Marian, a pianist, who in 1896 bought a farm in Peterborough, New Hampshire to spend their summers working on their craft in an isolated, natural setting. However, Edward fell ill not long after and expressed his wish to Marian to give that experience to other artists. In 1906, prominent U.S. citizens—among them President Grover Cleveland, Andrew Carnegie, and J. Pierpont Morgan—created a fund in Edward’s honor to make the idea a reality. Edward lived long enough to see the first class of fellows arrive, but died in 1908, and it was under Marian’s leadership that the program truly flourished.

“There is real power at this place, and when you get there and start to acclimate yourself, you also sort of start becoming the place and falling under its spell,” Rankin says of the experience. “There are secrets abound at Macdowell, little notes and gifts and musings left behind from past fellows stashed away in the cabins and around the forests, and in that way it feels like a living, breathing place that is constantly in dialogue with the people who’ve come before you, and with you being there you’re adding to that dialogue and in conversation with it. I’ve made lifelong friends, I held a presentation of my work, and it’s honestly a time in my life that I’ll never forget."

Despite his percussion background, Rankin’s pitch to MacDowell was for a hybrid electronics/choral work that drew texts from both the Old Testament of the Bible and science fiction literature. “I spent about three weeks before the residency started just really honing down what the exact concept of this piece was going to be,” he explained. While on the grounds, Rankin composed about 26 minutes worth of the piece, he says, after assembling “40 hours’ worth of random notes and ideas.” He continued, “I am very much a composer who likes to throw 100,000 things against the wall, and then say, ‘Well, what happens if I take like a little bit of this, a little bit of that…’  and then throw it together. I suppose making a collage is close to my approach.”

The list of composers who’ve come through MacDowell is extensive: Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, Amy Beach, and Meredith Monk to name a few. But because it’s a multidisciplinary opportunity, the grounds have been home to all nature of creatives, and Rankin’s lodging previously housed author Michael Chabon. It’s a neat bit of synchronicity with his time at SFCM: His professor Mason Bates adapted Chabon’s novel The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay into an opera, headed for New York’s Metropolitan Opera in fall of 2025. (From thousands of applicants across many disciplines of art, a little over 300 fellows are selected each year.)

Now based in Los Angeles, Rankin reveled in the opportunity to network with other artists via the optional presentations MacDowell offers participants. “People are working at such a, high level, you’re constantly reevaluating your own work, but in a very inspiring way,” he says. “The three weeks I spent there were very healing and ultimately a beautiful experience.”

Learn more about studying composition at SFCM.