Award-winning composer/scholar Paul Cosme (b.2000) conjures “wonderfully surreal” (The Classical Network) and “inventive” (Town Topics) sound worlds in his search for home through the interstices of Asian and Western music traditions through composition, performance, and research. Being at the interstices of his native Philippines, its diaspora, and neighbors to the East and West, Paul’s works seek to make connections and elucidate shared histories between various cultures and communities that he has since called his home.

As a composer, Paul draws from a plethora of sounds found in Western Classical, Asian traditions, rock, and jazz to weave soundscapes and narratives of immigration, belonging, and becoming. He collaborates with musicians and groups such as the Grammy-winning New Jersey Symphony, Grammy-nominated JACK Quartet, Pulitzer Prize-winning Raven Chacon, taiko master Kenny Endo, shakuhachi player Christopher Blasdel, kulintang player Ronald “kulintronica” Querian, sheng performer Loo Sze Wang, koto player Maruta Miki, geomungo player Ik-Soo Heo, pianist Angela Kim, violinist Ignace Jang, founding critical race theorist and visual artist Mari Matsuda, New York-based Contemporaneous, Sugar Hill Salon Collective, members of the Hawaiʻi Symphony and Minnesota Orchestras, Gugak musicians from Seoul National University, and many musicians he considers his dear friends.

His border-defying works gained recognition at home and abroad with institutions like the Philippine National Commission on Culture and the Arts, the Asian Composers League, the American Choral Directors Association, Edward T. Cone Institute at Princeton University, and Beth Morrison Projects in New York. He currently works on two major projects, the first is for a composition residency with Seoul National University working on new pieces for gugak instruments that explores the connections between Korean traditional music and ritual with Southeast Asian aesthetics and practices. The second is a contemporary dance suite inspired by traditional Mindanaoan dance movements and heavy metal music for Philippine cultural artistic collective, House of Gongs, utilizing the kulintang ensemble, electric stringed instruments, and Western percussion.

When Paul is not composing, he likes to improvise on the kulintang, a set of bronze knobbed gongs from Mindanao, Southern Philippines, which he had the fortune to play in the Honolulu premiere of 2022 Pulitzer Prize winner and Navajo composer Raven Chacon and Carcross/Tagish curator Candice Hopkins’s Dispatch.

As an ethnomusicologist, Cosme’s interests lie in conceptualizing intraculturality, and the engagement of the human and nonhuman in music practices across Southeast Asia, particularly avant-garde music, ritual, and gong-chime traditions of the region, which papers are published in journals in the Philippines and internationally such as Asian Music and Musika Jornal. His current work traces connections between the Tagalog dance-music ritual subli from Batangas and the Sama ritual pagkanduli from Tawi-Tawi. As part of this project, he currently works with communities in Bauan and Agoncillo, Batangas to document and preserve the subli chants and dances. His previous works include King Behind Colonial Curtains: Kasilag and the Making of Filipino National Culture (2022) and “‘Sorry, Goodbye... Evermore?’: Beyond Taylor Swift and Mimicry in Moira Dela Torre and Philippine Popular Music” (2024).

Paul received prizes and grants for his research and presented his work at international conferences and centers such as the University of Hawai’i Center for Philippine Studies, International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM), and the International Council on Traditional Music and Dance (ICTMD).

Paul currently studies composition as a doctoral student at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa. He was a Graduate Degree Fellow at the East-West Center and the recipient of the John Young Award in Arts & Letters. A winner of the Lila Bell Acheson Wallace Endowed Prize in Music, Paul graduated, summa cum laude, from Macalester College where he majored in Music and International Studies. His teachers include Randy Bauer, Victoria Malawey, Donald Reid Womack, Takuma Itoh, and Thomas Osborne.

Paul loves dogs, the morning dew, Beethoven op. 132, Pinoy indie music, mangoes, and his favorite Filipino dish—sinigang.