Photo courtesy of Robert Cummerow, 2025

Quick Facts

• Hometown: Syracuse, NY

• Current Location: Nashville, TN

• Teaches for Interlochen Center for the Arts, Online division 
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• Publishing Company:
   ADJ•ective New Music (ASCAP)

Education

• Bowling Green State University (M.M.) Music Composition

​• Bowling Green State University (M.M.) Bassoon Performance
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• SUNY Fredonia (Mus.B.)

Biographical Profile

Jamie Leigh Sampson is a composer, bassoonist, author, teacher, and entrepreneur based in Nashville, Tennessee. She has built her career in a way that serves her musical community through advocacy, research, and publishing practices. She is dedicated to providing opportunity for young musicians and clarifying routes to financial stability in the arts. She is one of the founders and co-owners of ADJ•ective New Music. 

​Sampson’s compositions explore a range of genres, emotions, and contemporary topics. She does not shy away from difficult subject matter including gun violence, grief, obsession, and emotional abuse, but also explores beauty, humor, love, and clumsiness. Her work for the Quince Contemporary Vocal Ensemble was called “transcendentally moving” by the Brooklyn Rail and “impressionistic, enabling the listener to focus on the beauty, timbre, and nuance of the singing.”

She has a long  history of commissions that includes a new orchestra work, Jupiter • Bringing Chaos into Orbit, for the Toledo Symphony Orchestra, Ships’ Passing for wind ensemble commissioned by a consortium led by University of North Texas Wind Orchestra with Dr. Andrew Trachsel, Waving Goodbye for the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, the alphabet: ruin of silence by the Paradise Winds Reed Quintet. She has collaborated with many ensembles over the course of her career, but repeatedly returns to working closely with the Quince Contemporary Vocal Ensemble, the Ritual Action Reed Trio, and the Cleveland Orchestra of Tennessee. She served as composer-in-residence with both the Sotto Voce Vocal Ensemble and Ohio University. 

As a sought after educator, Jamie has taught at a number of Universities, Interlochen Arts Camp, Interlochen Arts Academy, and she is currently building courses for the Interlochen Online platform. She has already built a Composition Certificate and is in the process of developing a Music Appreciation certificate, so that students can learn the fundamentals of music from wherever they are in the world.

Sampson’s primary area of research is contemporary techniques for the bassoon. Her first published resource, Contemporary Techniques for Bassoon: Multiphonics, documents thoroughly tested multiphonic fingerings for bassoon from the preexisting body of literature, identifying and eliminating those found to be unreliable, and presents 271 stable fingerings in a concise and cogent format for bassoonists and composers. The book has been described as, “a jewel and necessity for all bassoonists,” by Thomas Dempster in Volume 37, No. 2 of The Double Reed (the International Double Reed Society journal). She has presented on the her research at Northwestern University’s New Music Conference (2014), the NewBassoon Workshop at Eastman (2016), the International Double Reed Society Conference (2016), the soundSCAPE Festival (2017), and various universities throughout the United States.

Jamie has been awarded regional, state, and national grants and awards for her creative work including the Tri-county Arts Council’s Individual Artist Award (2019), New York Foundation for the Arts “Keep New York State Creating” grant (2020), and a New Music USA project grant for her “Women’s Strength in Song.” Through these grants she has been able to complete portions of multiple operas and record a forthcoming album of her works with text written and sung by her closest collaborators Pamela Hart (poet), Amanda DeBoer Bartlett (poet and vocalist), and Mariami Bekauri (vocalist). She earned the 2021 Marion Creativity Award from SUNY Fredonia for her opera In a Flash and in 2022 she was awarded the Alex Shapiro Prize for her first wind ensemble work Ships’ Passing. 

Regularly appearing on the Lexical Tones podcast, hosted by Robert McClure, Sampson has also appeared on Anthony Joseph Lanman's 1track podcast and Dennis Tobenski’s Music Publishing Podcast. She has also been a featured creator on I Care if You Listen and Toledo.com’s Creative Native column.

Jamie was born in Syracuse, NY and grew up in the Central New York region. She claims many hometowns and is still adding to the list. She earned her Bachelor’s degree in music composition from SUNY Fredonia and her Master’s degrees in Music Composition and Bassoon Performance from Bowling Green State University.