Susan Botti

Composer/Performer, Susan Botti's musical explorations have encompassed traditional, improvisational, and non-classical composition and singing styles with theater and visual arts playing a formative role in the practice and aesthetic of her work.

Botti is the recipient of numerous awards, including: a Guggenheim Fellowship, The Rome Prize, and the Goddard Lieberson Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; grants and commissions from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Aaron Copland Fund, the Fromm Foundation, the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts, Chamber Music America, NY Foundation for the Arts, NY State Council on the Arts, the Greenwall Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, and ASCAP. She was the third Daniel R. Lewis Young Composer Fellow with the Cleveland Orchestra. In many cases, she is the vocal soloist as well as composer of her works. Collaboration is of special interest – often, her projects evolve from artistic partnerships including musicians from the NY Philharmonic and the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra; soprano, Lucy Shelton; the poet Linda Gregerson; the poets of the Dream Project - writing for resilience, and theater designer, Leslie Taylor. 

Most recently, InfraSound premiered Botti’s Iconic, (a Chamber Music America commission), a music-theater piece which questions our adulation and then discard of human icons and heroes. Another recent work is her “theatrical motet”, 
River Spirits, for three voices and an ensemble of contemporary plus early music instruments (a Fromm Foundation commission). It is a futuristic abstract fable drawing on Italian “grammelot” and wide-ranging vocal techniques.

Botti’s recordings include: River Spirits (New Focus); Mangetsu with Duo della Luna (New Focus); Gates of Silence with the Blakemore Trio (Albany); and listen, it's snowing (New World/CRI), a recording of Botti’s vocal chamber music, which features her operatic soliloquy, Telaio: Desdemona ("striking emotional music..."/Opera Magazine), commissioned by The American Artists Series of Detroit, with subsequent performances internationally. 

Duo della Luna, Botti’s vocal/violin duo with Airi Yoshioka, specializes in the performance of intimate contemporary music and folk song-inspired arrangements and compositions. “…earthy and immediate with such a wide range…unusual and effective… infectiously lively performances…” (Andrew McGregor, BBC Radio 3). Advocating education and outreach, the duo is committed to performing in unusual and underserved venues. Their performances include concerts at Carnegie Hall, recitals throughout northern Italy, the Scotia Festival, and The Bowery Poetry Club (NYC).

Botti’s works for wind ensemble are acclaimed and widely performed, most recently her Vespers (walking in beauty) for mixed chorus and wind ensemble. She was the soloist in her Cosmosis (soprano, wind ensemble and treble choir) which premiered at Carnegie Hall.

EchoTempo (for Soprano, Percussion & Orchestra) was commissioned and premiered by Maestro Kurt Masur and the New York Philharmonic (with Botti and Christopher Lamb as soloists). A commission from the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra for solo violin and chamber orchestra, Within Darkness, was premiered at Carnegie Hall with Martha Caplin as violin soloist.

In addition to performing her own vocal works, Botti specializes in the performance of contemporary music of diverse styles. She has worked directly with composers such as Sofia Gubaidulina, Rahilia Hasanova, Matthias Pintscher, Paul Chihara, Toshio Hosokawa, and Wes York. For over a decade, composer/conductor Tan Dun created major works highlighting her vocal and theatrical talents, including the role of "Water" in his opera, Marco Polo (Sony Classical), and the vocal solo in his multimedia work for soprano and orchestra, Orchestral Theatre III: Red Forecast.

Susan Botti is a member of the Composition Faculty at the Manhattan School of Music.