Sora Jederan Shpack
Sora Jederan Shpack was a composer, lyricist, librettist, flutist and collaborative artist. She was driven by her passion to convey story, emotion and experience of people and place.
About Sora's Life
Sora lived a rich and meaningful life, giving herself deeply to all she encountered. She was dearly loved and will be greatly missed.
Barbara Sora Jederan Shpack (known as "Sora") was born on April 19, 1955, to Gloria Amalia Jederan Shpack and George Edward Shpack in Montclair, New Jersey.
Sora followed a distinctive path, living and finding community in many parts of the United States, including, New Jersey, New York, Vermont, Virginia, Pennslyvania, Florida, Indiana, Illinois, Texas, Utah and California. She was a single mother of six kids, a flutist, composer, educator, and a lifelong learner. Sora had many passions: gardening, cooking, reading and discussing politics, baking, archaeology, hiking, camping, yoga, playing games, visiting museums, seeing live theater and enjoying multi-episode period dramas.
Gregarious and outgoing, Sora was known to talk for hours with complete strangers, and to keep life long friends. Above all, Sora loved and lived for her children.
Sora had scoliosis, with two curves in her spine, and a lumbar fusion at age 15, and she practiced yoga, acupuncture, and herbal remedies to help her live with this disability. She was deeply spiritual, practicing a range of traditions at various times in her life: Judaism, Islam, Sufism, Mormonism, Neo-Hinduism and New Age spiritualism. In the end, Sora’s spirituality was unique to her, informed by vivid dreams and meditation, and her belief that God is within us all.
Sora is survived by her 24 descendants, whom she loved equally: her six children Christy Cope, Edward Shumway, David Shumway, Julie Rana, Emily Shumway, and Benjamin Shumway, her six children-in-law Michael Cope, Megan Shumway, Emma Lin, Saurav Rana, Harlan Hays, and Maejel Shumway, and her twelve grandchildren Chloe, Aiden, Jonah, Adam, Kate, Akash, Isha, Eli, Mason, Owen, Asher, and Alexander.
Sora passed away peacefully surrounded by beloved family on November 16, 2025 in San Francisco, CA from metastastic colon cancer.
About Sora's Style
Sora's compositional style is beautiful and unexpected. Her combination of soundscapes and melodies propel the audience forward into curiosity and wonder. Harmonies of consonance and dissonance support stories of hope, tragedy, and drama, juxtaposing the possible with the historical.
Education and Accolades
At Stetson University, Sora studied flute performance with Geoffrey Gilbert (1973-1975). Many of her compositions reflect her love for her primary instrument. Expanding her interests from flutist to composer, she completed a Master of Music in Composition at Carnegie Mellon University under Leonardo Balada (2008-2010). While at CMU Sora won first place in the string quartet competition for her piece Summer Travels. Additionally, in CMU's orchestral competition she won first place for her piece All the Walls. Sora also won first place in the 2009 Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra reading competition for All the Walls. The piece was received with great enthusiasm here and abroad, the Ramat Rachel Archaeological Project (Tel Aviv University, Israel) wrote, "Congratulations for All The Walls, we do love it! We wish it will be performed many more times – even some day with the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra in Tel Aviv."
Sora has received commissions from The Park Foundation and The Level Green Foundation for Songs of Many Waters, Montserrat Music Composition Festival for Deuteronomy III, GrassRoots Festival for All the Walls, FingerLakes Flutes for Contemporary Cantata and Hymn of Gratitude, VOICES Multicultural Chorus for the Islamic oratorio A Mother's Love, Ithaca Flute Duo for In Her Own Voice, and Champlain Valley Voices for Mettā-Maitrī.
The Story Behind The Opera
In 2005, Sora began to research and write her opera, TOV:The Other Voices. With a focus on historical fiction, 800-600 BCE in the Levant, Sora delved into the world of archeology analyzing different schools of thought. She began creating stories and getting feedback from writers, librettists and playwrights. The Opera morphed from centering around the mythical Moses, to telling of the historical King Josiah, and once even including a contemporary military family.
In 2017, she evaluated all she had written so far. With the aid of a professional archeologist, PhD student, Alexandra Wrathall, Sora honed in on the school of thought out of Tel Aviv University, following Israel Finklestein. As Finkelstein and Silberman write,”Having mainly the literature of the YHWH-alone camp, we do not know what their opponents might have claimed.” It is this sentence that sparked Sora’s imagination-- the central question of the Opera became unmistakably clear: How were the ancient peoples of the Levant impacted by this cultural shift from the “Many Gods” to the birth of the “One God Only”? While scholars posit what might have taken place, Sora renders these as an artist filling in the details with historical fiction.
Acknowledging the length and breadth of this work, Sora is creating the Opera as serial episodes of one-hour segments with the intention of having it both performed on stage and filmed for audiences around the world.