Susan Botti

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; soloists such as soprano, Lucy Shelton; the poet Linda Gregerson; the poets of the Dream Project - writing for resilience, and theater designer, Leslie Taylor.

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. Their debut recording, Mangetsu, was released in 2021 by New Focus Recordings.” …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. Recent performances include concerts at Carnegie Hall, throughout northern Italy, and the Scotia Festival.

A recently premiered 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. A recording of this work will be released in 2025 by New Focus. Another recent work is Vespers (walking in beauty) for mixed chorus and wind ensemble. Botti’s 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 and The Kennedy Center, with Martha Caplin as violin soloist.

Recordings include: Gates of Silence with the Blakemore Trio (Albany), incorporating poetry by National Book Award finalist, Linda Gregerson. This poetry, Dido Refuses to Speak, was awarded a 2011 Pushcart Prize; listen, it's snowing (New World/CRI), a recording of Botti’s vocal chamber music, featuring her operatic soliloquy, Telaio: Desdemona. Called "striking emotional music..." (Opera Magazine), this work was commissioned by The American Artists Series of Detroit, and has been performed in numerous venues in New York City, Taipei, Santa Fe, Atlanta, Birmingham, and Washington D.C. 

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 several major works highlighting her vocal and theatrical talents, including the role of "Water" in his opera, Marco Polo (Sony Classical), the vocal solo in his multimedia work for soprano and orchestra, Orchestral Theatre III: Red Forecast, and the vocal solo for the theme to his soundtrack for The Banquet.

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