Gilda Lyons (born January 11, 1975, Rhinebeck, New York) is an American composer, vocalist, and visual artist who writes music that "combines elements of renaissance, neo-baroque, spectral, agitprop Music Theater, and extended vocalism". [1]
Gilda Lyons (born January 11, 1975, Rhinebeck, New York) is an American composer, vocalist, and visual artist who writes music that "combines elements of renaissance, neo-baroque, spectral, agitprop Music Theater, and extended vocalism". [1]
Lyons attended Bard College, where she studied with Joan Tower and Daron Hagen, and in 1997 received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Music Composition, Vocal Performance, and Visual Arts.
She then attended the University of Pittsburgh, where she studied with Eric Moe and Anne LeBaron, and received a Master of Arts degree in Music Composition and Theory in 2001.
She studied with Daria Semegen and Peter Winkler at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, receiving a Doctor of Philosophy degree in 2005.
Lyons also studied voice, first at Bard with Arthur Burrows, then privately with heldentenor Barry Busse.
American Opera Projects in New York City chose her doctoral dissertation, "The Walled Up Wife" (opera, libretto and music by Lyons, 2005), for development and concert premiere. [2] Her critically successful 2015 opera, A New Kind of Fallout, commissioned and premiered by the Opera Theater of Pittsburgh with a libretto by Tammy Ryan, addressed "in achingly human terms ... an artful perspective on an important matter [the dangers of pesticides]". [3] Inspired by Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring," Lyons' music moves the opera well, fluently traversing distinctively characterized styles. She creates bright and open lines to start the opera and later when Alice and Jack exemplify a good marriage, and somewhat denser and more rhythmically agitated when there is conflict. Lyons' command of varied musical textures is masterful. [4]
She made her professional debut as both vocal soloist and composer in her own orchestral song cycle "Feis" (poetry of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, 1997) with the American Symphony Orchestra, Leon Botstein conducting. [5] She made her recording debut as the Maid in Daron Hagen's opera Shining Brow (Naxos, 2006) with the Buffalo Philharmonic, conducted by JoAnn Falletta. Of her performance, David Shengold, in Opera, UK, wrote, "Gilda Lyon’s clear soprano compels admiration." [6]
Lyons founded the Phoenix Concerts, a New York City-based contemporary music performing and presenting organization, in 2005 and serves as its Artistic and Executive Director. The New Yorker describes it as "New York’s plucky Upper West Side new-music series". [7] As of October 2014, Lyons had programmed music by over 160 composers on over fifty concerts. [8] She has commissioned and performed premières of works by numerous living composers, including Kathryn Alexander, Juhi Bansal, Hayes Biggs, Robert Carl, Chen S’iang, Jesse D’Aiello, Stephen Dembski, Jed Distler, Kaeza Fearn, Daniel Felsenfeld, Daniel Gilliam, Daron Hagen, Wang Jie, Paula Kimper, Wendy Wan'ki Lee, Katarina Leyman, Eli Marshall, Jorge Martin, Daphna Mor, Frank Oteri, Glen Roven, David Rakowski, Jessica Rudman, She Ye, Faye-Ellen Silverman, Daniel Sonenberg, Dennis Tobenski, Craig Urquhart, Barbara White, Beth Wiemann, Peter Winkler, Randall Woolf, and Zhou Xu.
Lyons served as Assistant Executive Director of the New York New Music Ensemble (2006–2008) and Executive Director of the Lotte Lehmann Foundation (2008–2011). She has served as Adjunct Assistant Professor at Bronx Community College (2006–2012), as a Special Projects Instructor for Empire State College (2006–2008), and as a member of the composition faculty of the Seasons Music Festival Academy (2009–2012), [9]
Since 2013, she has served as a Senior Artist Teacher with her own composition studio on the faculty of The Hartt School. In 2014, she joined the composition faculty of the Wintergreen Summer Music Festival and Academy.
Lyons has received commissions from, among others, the ASCAP Foundation / Charles Kingsford Fund, American Opera Projects, Amy Pivar Dances, the Beijing New Music Ensemble, ComposersCollaborative Inc., Fort Greene Park Conservancy, Paul Sperry, Two Sides Sounding, Adrienne Dandrich, Thomas Bagwell, the Finisterra Trio, Entelechron Trio, Kyo-Shin-An Arts, the 5 Borough Music Festival, the AIDS Quilt Songbook at Twenty, Mirror Visions, IonSound, Sweet Plantain String Quartet, and The Walt Whitman Project.
Lyons often turns to unusual sources for texts, and combines ritualistic chant and expanded vocal techniques. Tom Strini in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel described "Nahuatl Hymn to the Earth Mother" for treble choir as “hair-raising, yet elegant, [with] slides, dips, yips and yelps amid ceremonial intensity." [10] (Clarion CLCD-936) The wide range of her textual sources embraces poetry by grade school children in the Bronx "Songs from the F Train", (commissioned by American Opera Projects, and published by Schott, 2010), [11] the Anne Sexton-inspired solo voice cycle "A Small Handful" (EC Schirmer, 2006), [12] and even "transforms acronyms, route numbers and letters and a listing of transit-authority service changes into a comic soprano and mezzo-soprano duet [called] rapid transit". [13]
She also incorporates visual imagery, as in the multi-media work "riverrun", (images by Holen Sabrina Kahn) and combines voice with pre-recorded sound, as in "walk, run, fly", which she premiered at The Flea Theater in New York City in 2012, [14] and "Coney Run", in which she integrates piano, voices, and music concrete.
Schott Music, EC Schirmer, and Burning Sled Music publish her music. Recordings are available on the GPR and Clarion labels.
David Conte is an American composer who has written over 150 works published by E.C. Schirmer, including six operas, a musical, works for chorus, solo voice, orchestra, chamber music, organ, piano, guitar, and harp. Conte has received commissions from Chanticleer, the San Francisco Symphony Chorus, Harvard University Chorus, the Men’s Glee Clubs of Cornell University and the University of Notre Dame, GALA Choruses from the cities of San Francisco, New York, Boston, Atlanta, Seattle, and Washington, D.C., the Dayton Philharmonic, the Oakland Symphony, the Stockton Symphony, the Atlantic Classical Orchestra, the American Guild of Organists, Sonoma City Opera, and the Gerbode Foundation. He was honored with the American Choral Directors Association (ACDA) Brock Commission in 2007 for his work The Nine Muses, and in 2016 he won the National Association of Teachers of Singing (NATS) Art Song Composition Award for his work American Death Ballads.
Daron Aric Hagen is an American composer, writer, and filmmaker.
Reri Grist is an American coloratura soprano, one of the pioneer African-American singers to enjoy a major international career in opera.
Lee Henry Hoiby was an American composer and classical pianist. Best known as a composer of operas and songs, he was a disciple of composer Gian Carlo Menotti. Like Menotti, his works championed lyricism at a time when such compositions were deemed old fashioned. His most well known work is his setting of Tennessee Williams's Summer and Smoke, which premiered at the St Paul Opera in 1971.
Eugenia Karagiannidou, better known as Eugenia Manolidou (Μανωλίδου) or Manolides, is a Greek classical composer, conductor, entertainment television presenter and is married to politician and Minister for Development and Investment of Greece Adonis Georgiadis.
The American Opera Project (AOP) is a professional opera company based in Brooklyn, New York City, and is a member of Opera America, the Fort Greene Association, the Downtown Brooklyn Arts Alliance, and the Alliance of Resident Theatres/New York (A.R.T./NY). The company's primary mission is to develop and present new operatic and music theatre works and has gained a reputation for the "rarefied range" of the projects it fosters. AOP was founded in 1988 by Grethe Barrett Holby who served as Artistic Director of AOP from 1988 until 2001, at which point Charles Jarden became the company's Executive Director and Steven Osgood the company's Artistic Director. Steven Osgood left the post of Artistic Director in 2008 to pursue conducting full-time but remains the Artistic Director for AOP's "Composers & the Voice" program.
Pittsburgh Festival Opera (PFO), formerly Opera Theater of Pittsburgh, is a professional American opera company based in Pittsburgh's university and museum district. Pittsburgh Festival Opera performs at non-traditional venues around the city.
Lisette Oropesa is an American operatic soprano of Cuban ancestry. Her repertoire includes works from Gluck, Handel, Mozart, Rossini, Donizetti, Wagner, Verdi, Bizet, Massenet and Puccini. With her lyric coloratura soprano voice, she has performed roles in her native Spanish and English, as well as German, French and Italian. She is particularly noted in the roles of Susanna, Gilda, Konstanze, Lucia and Manon.
Violeta Dinescu is a Romanian composer, pianist and academic teacher, living in Germany since 1982.
Jennifer Zetlan is an American operatic soprano who has sung leading roles with many opera companies in the United States, including the Metropolitan Opera, the Seattle Opera, and the Santa Fe Opera among others. She has performed in the world premieres of operas by composers Matthew Aucoin, Daron Hagen, Nico Muhly, and Ricky Ian Gordon.
Vera of Las Vegas is an opera by Daron Hagen with a libretto by Paul Muldoon based on a treatment co-written with the composer. It is Hagen's second opera, after Shining Brow. The Center for Contemporary Opera gave the staged premiere on 25 June 2003 at the Leonard Nimoy Thalia Theatre of Symphony Space in New York City.
Victoria Ellen Bond is an American conductor and composer in New York City.
New York Stories is a trilogy of English-language one-act operas by Daron Hagen, with a libretto by Hagen and Barbara Grecki first performed in its entirety by Kentucky Opera in Louisville, Kentucky, on 30 October 2010.
The Antient Concert is a sixty-minute-long English language opera in one act by Daron Hagen with a libretto by Paul Muldoon. Hagen describes it as a "dramatic recital for four singers".
Missy Mazzoli is an American composer and pianist who is a member of the composition faculty at the Mannes College of Music. She has received critical acclaim for her chamber, orchestral and operatic work. In 2018 she became one of the first two women to receive a commission from the Metropolitan Opera House. She is the founder and keyboardist for Victoire, an electro-acoustic band dedicated to performing her music. From 2012-2015 she was composer-in-residence at Opera Philadelphia, in collaboration with Gotham Chamber Opera and Music-Theater Group. Her music is published by G. Schirmer. Mazzoli received a 2015 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award, a Fulbright Grant to the Netherlands, and in 2018 was nominated for a Grammy Award in the category of Best Classical Composition. In 2018, Mazzoli was named for a two-season term as the Mead Composer-in-Residence with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Mazzoli was named the Bragg Artist-in-Residence at Mount Allison University beginning in 2022.
Christopher Cerrone is an American composer based in New York City. He was a 2014 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, a 2014 Fromm Foundation commission recipient, a 2015 Rome Prize winner in Music Composition, and has received numerous awards from ASCAP.
A Woman in Morocco is an English language opera in two acts composed by Daron Hagen and based on an unperformed play by Barbara Grecki. It was premiered by Kentucky Opera in Louisville, Kentucky, June 23, 2015, in a production directed by the composer. The libretto is by Hagen and Grecki, who also co-wrote the treatment. The story, set in Tangier in October 1958, concerns the disappearance of an American investigative journalist named Lizzy Holmes working on an exposé of sex trafficking. The work received a complete workshop staging at the Butler Opera Center of the Sarah and Ernest Butler School of Music at the University of Texas-Austin October 25, 2013.
Carolann Page is an American singer and actress. She is a crossover artist with credits in musical theatre, opera, chamber music and concert repertoire.
Jocelyn Hagen is an American composer. She composes primarily for voice: solo, chamber and choral, but also has composed for chamber, wind, and orchestral ensembles. She has explored large-scale multimedia works, electro-acoustic music, dance, and opera.
Rosemarie Brancato was an American coloratura soprano who had an active performance career in operas, operettas, and concerts on the American stage and on American radio from the mid-1930s into the 1950s. She created the role of Madame Boticini in the original Broadway production of Fritz Kreisler's Rhapsody in 1944.
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