Composer in Residence

Tina Davidson

The composer-in-residence program is a new initiative established this season to allow our community to engage with a living composer over a period of three years. Our inaugural composer for this program is local composer, Tina Davidson. 

As part of this program, the chorale will perform at least one piece of Tina’s at each of our concerts. The three-year residency will conclude with a multi-movement commission focused on the refugee experience in our area. Tina will work with the participants of this project to write their stories and poems about their journey and integrate into the work.

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A highly regarded American composer, Davidson is lauded for her authentic musical voice. The New York Times has praised her “vivid ear for harmony and colors.” OperaNews called her works, “transfigured beauty,” and the Philadelphia Inquirer writes that she creates, “real music, with structure, mood, novelty and harmonic sophistication – with haunting melodies that grow out of complex, repetitive rhythms.”

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Over her fifty-year career, she has been commissioned by well-known ensembles such as National Symphony Orchestra, OperaDelaware, Roanoke Symphony, VocalEssence, Kronos Quartet, Cassatt Quartet, public television (WHYY-TV) and Grammy Award-winning violinist Hilary Hahn.

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Davidson’s memoir, Let Your Heart Be Broken, Life and Music from a Classical Composer, (Boyle & Dalton), published in 2023, is “a consummate read in its entirety,” written with “uncommon sensitivity and poetic insight” (The Marginalian). In 2024 she released her new album, Barefoot, on New Focus Recordings, featuring  her chamber music performed by the Jasper String Quartet  and pianist Natalie Zhu. “Each of the five works inhabits a single intense emotion, which Davidson pursues with her own energy, like a life force, barely concealed beneath the surface” (Gramophone).