"Fábregas is one gifted with a blue guitar. Her tunes are beyond us, yet ourselves. Indeed they are tunes of things exactly as they are." —American Music Teacher Magazine
Spanish/American composer Elisenda Fábregas (born Elisenda Fábregas Torras in 1955, Terrassa, Catalonia) writes music the New York Times has called "imaginatively colored," praised for its "yearning dissonances" and "pervasive sensuality" (San Antonio Express-News), and for being "complex and haunting" (Washington Post) with "gorgeous lyricism" (NATS Journal). In 2000, she received the Shepherd Distinguished Composer Award from the Music Teachers National Association.
During the 2023–24 season, Fábregas was resident composer at the Palau de la Música Catalana in Barcelona, where four new commissions were premiered. Her collaboration with Cuarteto Casals produced the string quartet Fiery Earth (also performed under the Catalan title Terra encesa), premiered at the Palau on March 19, 2025. The quartet is performing the work throughout the 2025–26 season across Europe, North America, and Asia — including the Concertgebouw, the Musikverein, the Pierre Boulez Saal, the Phillips Collection, and the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation — with Asian premieres in Hong Kong and Seoul in October 2026. Recent commissions include Càntic d’exaltació, an overture written for the 140th-anniversary season of Barcelona’s Banda Municipal (premiered October 2025), and a new song cycle on poems by Rainer Maria Rilke, commissioned by the International Hugo Wolf Academy Stuttgart for its 2026 Vocal Competition.
Fábregas’s music has been performed at the Kennedy Center, Merkin Concert Hall in New York, the Seoul Arts Center, the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, and at festivals and concert halls across Europe, Asia, and the Americas. Recordings of her music appear on Naxos, Bridge Records, Albany Records, Centaur Records, and other labels; her scores are published by Hofmeister Musikverlag (Leipzig), Alphonse Leduc (Paris), and her own imprint, Hidden Oaks Music Co.
Fábregas holds doctorates from Columbia University Teachers College (Education) and the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University (Composition), and received a master’s and bachelor’s degree in piano performance from The Juilliard School. After eleven years as a Visiting Professor at Kyung-Hee University in Seoul, she now lives and composes full-time in Catalonia, Spain.