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photo credit: Daniel Alexander Denino

Bio: Cecilia Livingston specializes in music for voice. She is composer-in-residence at the Canadian Opera Company (2022-) and composer-in-residence at Glyndebourne Opera (2019-2022). Her music is driven by melody, mixing styles from minimalism to The American Songbook to create work that is lyrical and unsettling.

Cecilia’s residencies at the COC and Glyndebourne build on her two-year fellowship at The American Opera Project in New York. Her opera Singing Only Softly won the inaugural Mécénat Musica Prix 3 Femmes and was nominated for two Dora Mavor Moore Awards for Theatre (including Outstanding New Opera), and her harp and vibraphone duo Garden features on the 2020 JUNO Classical Album of the Year for Solo or Chamber. Her current projects include new work for the COC, for the National Arts Centre Orchestra, and an orchestral song cycle with poet Anne Michaels. Her music has been heard with Soundstreams, Bang on a Can’s summer festival, Toronto’s Nuit Blanche festival, in recital at Koerner Hall and Carnegie Hall, with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, the Kingston Symphony, Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra, and will be released on recording with Deutsche Grammophon in 2023.

She was a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Postdoctoral Fellow in Music at King’s College London and her articles and reviews have appeared in ‘Tempo’ (Cambridge), the ‘Cambridge Opera Journal’, and ‘The Opera Quarterly’ (Oxford); she has given papers on contemporary opera at the Royal Musical Association, American Musicological Society, and Modern Language Association (MLA) annual conferences.

Winner of the Canadian Music Centre’s Toronto Emerging Composer Award and a winner in the SOCAN Foundation Awards for Young Composers, she studied with Steve Reich at Bang on a Can’s summer festival and Soundstreams’ Emerging Composer Workshop. She holds a doctorate in composition from the University of Toronto, where she was awarded the Theodoros Mirkopoulos Fellowship in Composition. She is Vice-President of the Canadian League of Composers.
Cecilia is represented by Stratagem Artists in New York.

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