Abbie Betinis, Composer

Acclaimed as "audacious… edgy and thrilling," the music of Abbie Betinis (b. 1980) has been commissioned by more than 40 music organizations including the Dale Warland Singers, Cantus, and The Schubert Club. She has won grants and awards from the American Composers Forum, ASCAP, Jerome Foundation, and the Minnesota Music Educators Association, and was recently declared a 2009 McKnight Artist Fellow.

A language enthusiast, Abbie enjoys delving into ancient and modern texts in the hopes of inspiring greater cultural literacy and exchange. Her text-setting has been called imaginative and sensitive, even while pushing performers to explore extended vocal techniques such as yodeling, crying, spitting, whistling, glottal grunts, or bird-calling. Recent projects investigate ancient Greek charms and spells, African melorhythm technique, pre-Christian Irish keening, and - in an extended work written for The Rose Ensemble - the mystical imagery of 14th century Sufism for women's voices, vielle, oud, and Persian hand percussion.

Abbie holds a BA from St. Olaf College, MA from the University of Minnesota, and has done post-graduate work at the European American Musical Alliance in Paris, France, where she studied harmony and counterpoint in the tradition of Nadia Boulanger with Phillip Lasser, Samuel Adler, and Narcis Bonet. In 2006, Abbie launched a self-publishing company, and now markets and distributes her own scores internationally. Additional scores are available through Fred Bock Co., Graphite Publishing, Kjos, Santa Barbara Music Publishing, and G. Schirmer's Dale Warland Series.

Since 2005, Abbie has served as Composer-in-Residence for The Schubert Club in St. Paul, Minnesota. She has also held residencies with The Singers-Minnesota Choral Artists and The Rose Ensemble. She lives in St. Paul.

Judith Cloud, Composer

Composer Judith Cloud's gift for vocal writing originates out of her own rich experiences as an accomplished mezzo-soprano soloist. Performing throughout the United States, Cloud premiered many new works by young composers as well as her own music, including acclaimed performances at the Aspen Music Festival, with the Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra, the Tallahassee Symphony, the Jacksonville Symphony, the Sedona Chamber Music Festival, the Flagstaff Festival of the Arts Orchestra and the Rome Festival Orchestra. Highlights of her performing career include a performance of the Brahms Neueliebeslieder Waltzer with the acclaimed radio program Saint Paul Sunday Morning, as well as being the soloist for the American premier performance of Michael Tippett's A Child of Our Time with the Winston-Salem Symphony. She still remains active as a recitalist and soloist, and performed the mezzo solos in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony with the Flagstaff Symphony, Elizabeth Schulze conducting, in the spring of 2009.

Cloud first began composing for the voice in 1974, and she has garnered a reputation as a "singer-friendly" composer. Her work has been described as "eminently singable, displaying a rich harmonic palate with an audience-entrancing sense of vocal line that is both dramatic and beautiful." Among her compositions are many choral pieces and works in a wide variety of other genres, including a concerto for soprano saxophone and orchestra, a woodwind quintet, and a piece for soprano saxophone, trumpet and horn entitled Variations on an Old Negro Spiritual.

Art song collections include Night Dreams (Margaret Atwood), The Secret History of Water (Silvia Curbelo), Awake On A Spring Night (Betty Andrews), and Three Songs from "Gleanings" a chamber work for soprano, clarinet and piano featured at the 2006 International Alliance for Women in Music International Conference in Miami, Florida.

Other choral compositions include her cantata Feet of Jesus, for soprano and baritone soloists, soprano saxophone, chorus and organ, and is recorded with BIS on a CD entitled "Spirituals," released in 1997 by the Saint Jacob's Chamber Choir and directed by Gary Graden. Words from an Artist's Palette, a recent commission for men's choir was recorded on the Clarion recording "First Day," by the Santa Fe Desert Chorale, Linda Mack, conductor. Three Spells (Kathleen Raine), for women's a cappella choir and Baroque flute has been presented in London by Psallite, under the direction of Nancy Hadden, world wide specialist on wooden flutes from the Renaissance, Baroque and Classical periods.

In May of 2009 singers and pianists came together to record selected solo vocal works by Cloud for a CD with Summit Records to be released in 2011. Judith Cloud also participated in the recording singing Four Sonnets by Pablo Neruda, set 2. The CD, to be titled "Letting Escape A Song" includes Quatre Mélodies De Ronsard, for baritone, composed in honor of noted art song scholar, Carol Kimball.

Current projects include Four Songs of the Heart, to poetry by Kathleen Raine for soprano Jennifer Trost and pianist Arlene Shrut, and a large-scale work for chorus and soloists, The Grieving Earth, to texts by New York poet, Perry Brass.

Cloud has been an honored composer in residence with the noted "Escape to Create" program sponsored by the Seaside Institute in Seaside, FL for two seasons.

Dr. Cloud received vocal performance degrees from the North Carolina School of the Arts, and Florida State University. Her first composition lessons were with Robert Ward, who advised her to keep singing-but to keep writing music, too. She has been a member of the music faculty for The North Carolina School of the Arts, Florida Community College at Jacksonville, and Indiana State University. She is currently Coordinator of Voice at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, where she teaches studio voice and vocal pedagogy. Inspiring students with her teaching as well as her compositional talents, she was awarded "Teacher of the Year" for the College of Fine Arts in 2004.

The composer is a member in good standing with ASCAP (American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers.)

Jocelyn Hagen, Composer

Jocelyn Hagen (b.1980), a native of Valley City, North Dakota, composes music that has been described as "dramatic and deeply moving" (Star Tribune, Minneapolis/St. Paul). Her first forays into composition were via songwriting, and this is very evident in her work. Her music is melodically driven, boldly beautiful, and intricately crafted. Since her graduation from St. Olaf College in 2003, Jocelyn has received over 40 commissions, 50 premieres, and 100 performances.

Jocelyn has received grants and awards from ASCAP, the American Composers Forum, Minnesota Music Educators Association, VocalEssence, the Yale Glee Club, the Lotte Lehman Foundation, the University of Minnesota, and the San Francisco Song Festival. Her commissions include the American Choral Directors Association of Minnesota, the North Dakota Music Teacher's Association, Cantus, the St. Olaf Band, NDSU Gold Star Band, and the Copper Street Brass. She is currently Composer-in-Residence for Shorter College in Rome, Georgia, as well as the group she sings in: The Singers - Minnesota Choral Artists. She founded Graphite Publishing, an online publishing company, in 2004 along with fellow composer Timothy C. Takach, and is also published by Boosey and Hawkes. Former teachers include Judith Lang Zaimont, Peter Hamlin, David Maslanka, Mary Ellen Childs, and Timothy Mahr. She completed her Masters in Composition at the University of Minnesota in 2006.

Martha Sullivan

Martha Sullivan's music has been praised as "vibrant" and "a singer's favorite". She has earned commissions from such leading voices in American choral music as the Dale Warland Singers and the Gregg Smith Singers (with whom she was a resident composer, 2002-2008), as well as the Esoterics (Seattle, WA), Bella Voce (Reno, NV), Chicago A Cappella, the New York Treble Singers, the Manhattan Choral Ensemble, and Vocativ (Zürich, Switzerland). Numerous ensembles have performed her work, including such New York fixtures as Cerddorion and Equal Voices, as well as groups further afield, such as San Francisco's Volti, and the Southern Oregon Repertory Singers. Her work has been championed by Stephen Tharp, the international organ recitalist, and recorded by The Esoterics, Chicago A Cappella, and mezzo-soprano Virginia Dupuy. Her work appears in the book Singing for Dummies. Her chamber music has been performed by the Pharos Music Project, of which she was a cofounder. She has received several Meet the Composer grants for her work with Gregg Smith, as well as recognition from the National Endowment for the Arts for her work with the Esoterics, and she won the Dale Warland Singers' Choral Ventures competition in its final year (2003).

Sullivan is also an experienced singer of new music. She made her New York City Opera debut on the company's series of new operas, Vox, in 2007, as the troubled mother, Louise, in Gordon Beeferman's The Rat Land; she repeated the role on VOX2009. Other highlights as a soloist include premieres by Toby Twining (Chrysalid Requiem) and John Zorn (various), and Peter Westergaard's Alice in Wonderland with the Center for Contemporary Opera. She has also performed Steve Reich's Tehillim with the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, Milton Babbitt's Elizabethan Sextette on the Guggenheims's "Works and Process" series, and Morton Feldman's Rothko Chapel with Vox Vocal Ensemble. She has also sung as a chorister with many of New York's choral groups over the last decade; in fact, her very first professional New York job was singing at Dennis Keene's choral workshop, Keenefest, in 1998.