Gilda Lyons

From Wind Repertory Project
Gilda Lyons

Biography

Gilda Lyons, (b. 11 January 1975, Rhinebeck, N.Y.) is an American composer, vocalist, and visual artist.

Dr. Lyons holds a B.A. in music composition, vocal performance, and visual arts from Bard College (1997), where she studied with Joan Tower and Daron Hagen; an M.A. in music composition and theory from the University of Pittsburgh (2001), where she studied with Eric Moe and Anne LeBaron; and a Ph.D. from The State University of New York at Stony Brook (2005), where she studied with Daria Semegen and Peter Winkler. 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. Her critically successful 2015 opera, A New Kind of Fallout, inspired by Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, commissioned and premiered by 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]."

Lyons serves as composer-in-residence for Chautauqua Opera Company, co-chair of the composition program at Wintergreen Summer Music Academy, Va., and as visiting assistant professor of composition at The Hartt School, Conn. She is artistic and executive director of The Phoenix Concerts, New York's "intrepid Upper West Side new-music series" (The New Yorker), and serves on the board of advisors of Composers Now and the Steven R. Gerber Trust.


Works for Winds


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