Filipino composer/scholar Paul Gabriel L. Cosme (b. 2000) blends and breaks boundaries in his constant search for home. He combines various media, forms, and sound worlds from Asian and Western traditions with classical, pop & rock, jazz, and traditional artists from the United States and throughout Asia and the Pacific including the GRAMMY-nominated JACK Quartet, Pulitzer-Prize winning Navajo composer Raven Chacón, taiko master Kenny Endo, shakuhachi player Christopher Blasdel, kulintang player Ronald Querian “kulintronica,” sheng performer Loo Sze Wang, koto player Maruta Miki, Gugak musicians from Seoul National University, members of the Hawaiʻi Symphony, the BIPOC-centered Sugar Hill Salon Collective in New York, and many musicians he considers his dear friends. He is the inaugural winner of the Nā Haku Mele Competition of the Hawaiʻi Chapter of the American Choral Directors Association where he arranged Queen Liliʻuokalani’s song. He is currently one of the winning composers of Edward T. Cone Institute where his work will be premiered by the New Jersey Symphony.

Paul studies composition as a master’s student at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa as a Graduate Degree Fellow at the East-West Center where he also researches national constructions of the Philippines through contemporary and popular music which are published and presented in various journals and conferences in the United States and the Philippines. A winner of the Lila Bell Acheson Wallace Endowed Prize in Music, Paul graduated, summa cum laude, from Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota where he majored in Music and International Studies. His teachers include Randy Bauer, Victoria Malawey, Donald Reid Womack, Takuma Itoh, and Thomas Osborne.