About Megan Ihnen
Photo credit: Dylan Trần
Download Digital Press KitShort Bio
Megan Ihnen is a mezzo-soprano on a mission to change the world through the commissioning, performance, and proliferation of new music.
When Megan Ihnen sings, she soars.
Maggie Molloy, Second Inversion
From opera stages to intimate chamber music halls, the mezzo-soprano is on a mission to expand the world of new and experimental vocal music. With clarity, charisma, and incredible vocal control, she breathes new life into music ranging from the modern sounds of Cage and Crumb to up-to-the-minute works of today’s top composers. Megan has performed with new music moguls such as the International Contemporary Ensemble and Fifth House Ensemble, and her own Seen/Heard Trio is devoted to performing works by rarely-recorded composers.
Program Bio
Megan Ihnen is a New Orleans–based mezzo-soprano praised for her “impressive set of pipes” (Take Effect). A fearless champion of new music, she has inspired and premiered more than 100 works written expressly for her voice. Performance highlights include appearances with International Contemporary Ensemble, Fifth House Ensemble, Great Noise Ensemble, and festivals such as Houston Grand Opera’s Religare where she performed John Cage’s iconic 4’33”, Tuesdays @ Monk Space, Access Contemporary Music’s Thirsty Ears, and NEXTET. Her multi-album project Sleep Songs commissions wordless lullabies from living composers, while Neonautica’s touring show Black Meridian weaves her voice with saxophone and electronics in a meditation on cosmic distortion and human fracture. She is an active member of the Memphis Chapter of the Recording Academy and a faculty member at the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University.
Ihnen’s performance of Aria by John Cage transfixed the audience through her seamless transitions between characters. Going far beyond the requisite “characters” that a singer chooses to assign each color in the color-coded score, Ihnen told a story through her perfectly choreographed body language and facial expression to match. She exquisitely embodied a breathy, flirtatious movie star, immediately juxtaposed by an angry Italian caricature, followed by a voice reminiscent of the nasal Charlie Brown teacher. Ihnen clearly took the time to develop each of the characters, creating a superb overarching journey that might otherwise seem disjointed to the new listener.
Anne Goldberg-Baldwin, I Care If You Listen
Long Bio
Megan Ihnen is a “new music force of nature.” As a mezzo-soprano, composer-improviser, and curator, she treats the voice as both ritual and instrument. Her performances traverse contemporary classical chamber works, experimental and graphic scores, live electronics, and site-responsive pieces, all while remaining tethered to the raw, tactile presence of the acoustic body. Raised in the Midwest (where she’ll still run to watch tornadic activity from the garage…), Megan brings a quiet intensity to each project she touches, creating solo sets that resonate in unlikely spaces and building expansive, collaborative works fueled by trust, laughter, and shared artistic fire.
Audiences have witnessed Megan’s appetite for non-traditional vocal performance with pieces like John Cage’s Aria, which she performed nearly a hundred times before 2020 (including a Halloween burlesque in Des Moines that drafted the audience for scream-filled “extra-musical” passages). That same fearless impulse drives her one-woman and/or electronics-infused sets: she has sculpted Tristan Gianola’s live chamber score for the silent horror classic Häxan (Happyland Theater, New Orleans, LA & Lantern Light Records, 2023) and tackles graphic works such as Adam Scott Neal’s acrylic-splotched Splatter Score (nienteForte, 2021) and Jason Barabba’s Phonetical Lullaby (video release, 2024), whose notation is a collaboration with the composer’s painter mother. Improvised jazz inflections color her interpretations of Matthew Evan Taylor’s Joyful Noise: Sound of Defiance (Durward Ensemble & Prophetic Revolutions album, 2022), while Ryan Carraher’s demanding “…most of us…” (New Music on the Bayou, 2024) pushes her vocal and physical limits into “New Sincerity” extremes. Even Cage’s 4′33″, which she performed for Houston Grand Opera’s Religare series in 2021, becomes a charged theatrical event in her care.
Offstage, Megan builds platforms for new repertoire. She curated the NewMusicShelf Anthology for Mezzo-Soprano, Volume 1, serves as a score reviewer for New Music on the Bayou, and has sat on grant panels for the Copland Fund, New Music USA, and others. Her multi-album Sleep Songs project, now 26+ commissions deep, invites composers to write wordless lullabies she can realize with voice, viola, piano, crotales, or even a household sound machine. PARMA’s Navona label enlisted her to assemble and record CURRENTS IN TIME, selecting works from an open call that showcased her ensembles’ range. Megan also serves on the faculty of the Peabody Institute’s Professional Studies Department and is a Voting Member of the Recording Academy’s Memphis Chapter.
Megan delights in aligning music with visual narrative. She toured Kurtág’s Kafka Fragments (Atlas Performing Arts Center; UMKC Summer Composition Workshop; UCCS Peak FreQuency) with violinist Martha Muehleisen, commissioning Rome Prize artist Karen Yasinsky to create hand-drawn stop-motion films that reframed the musical work through the lens of mountaineer Junko Tabei. Other cross-disciplinary ventures include Erik Spangler’s site-specific Devonian Geometry in Iowa’s fossil gorge in 2017 (also SPLICE Festival, 2018); Debra Loewen’s Into the Garden with saxophonist Nick Zoulek and Wild Space Dance Company in Milwaukee’s Villa Terrace Decorative Arts Museum in 2016; and an early version of Nathan Davis’s Hagoromo with International Contemporary Ensemble for the Guggenheim’s Works & Process series in 2015.
Memory, nostalgia, and fragile relationships thread through her semi-staged art-song programs. Single Words She Once Loved (UMKC Summer Composition Workshop, 2016) probes a mother-daughter bond tested by Alzheimer’s, while Neonautica’s evening-length Black Meridian places commissioned pieces, songs by Sara Bareilles and David Byrne & St. Vincent, and Beuger’s meditative ein ton inside a story of black holes and a doomed relationship.
Sought after by composers and ensembles, Megan has delivered Julia Perry’s Stabat Mater (UNO Excursion Series, 2024), Zelenka’s Lamentations (Baton Rouge, LA, 2025), Jake Heggie’s Statuesque (Fresh Inc Festival, 2013), Joseph Schwantner’s Wild Angels of the Open Hills with Seen/Heard Trio and Synchromy, and Garrett Schumann’s Bound with Latitude 49 musicians. Her festival résumé ranges from Bang on a Can at MASS MoCA, singing Crumb’s Ancient Voices of Children, to Oh My Ears, where she hosted an outdoor, communal New Music Slumber Party complete with quilts and a cereal bar.
Through every project, Megan Ihnen champions living creators, invites listeners into unexpected musical experiences, and proves that the voice, whether it’s looped, whispered, screamed, or soaring unadorned, remains a limitless instrument for the twenty-first-century imagination.