Cecilia Livingston

With music described as “haunting” and “eerily beautiful” (Tapestry Opera), composer Cecilia Livingston specializes in music for voice. She is composer-in-residence at Glyndebourne Opera. Her projects often tell women’s stories, inviting audiences to reconsider familiar literary and historical characters, and her music is driven by melody, mixing styles from minimalism to jazz to create work that is lyrical and unsettling.

Cecilia’s residency at Glyndebourne is supported by the Canada Council for the Arts and builds on her fellowship at The American Opera Project in New York. Winner of the Canadian Music Centre’s Toronto Emerging Composer Award, the Mécénat Musica Prix 3 Femmes for female opera creators in Canada, and a winner in the SOCAN Foundation Awards for Young Composers, her music has been heard at Bang on a Can’s summer festival, Nuit Blanche, the 21C Music Festival, World Choir Games, with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, the Kingston Symphony, Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra, and with Toronto’s Thin Edge New Music Collective.

Her opera Singing Only Softly was nominated for two 2020 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: Solo or Chamber. Current projects include Terror & Erebus, an opera for TorQ Percussion Quartet and Opera 5, new work for Glyndebourne, and a song cycle with Orange Prize winning poet Anne Michaels.

Vice-President of the Canadian League of Composers and an associate composer of the Canadian Music Centre, her creative work is supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, the Toronto Arts Council, and SOCAN Foundation.

She is a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Postdoctoral Fellow in Music at King's College London. 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 and American Musicological Society annual conferences. She studied with Steve Reich at Bang on a Can’s summer festival and Soundstreams’ Emerging Composer Workshop, and she holds a doctorate in composition from the University of Toronto, supervised by Christos Hatzis, where she was awarded the Theodoros Mirkopoulos Fellowship in Composition.

Cecilia is represented by Stratagem Artists.