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 the visual arts playing a formative role in the 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, 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 singer Lucy Shelton; the poet Linda Gregerson; and theater designer, Leslie Taylor).

Duo della Luna is Botti’s vocal/violin duo with Airi Yoshioka, specializing 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 in 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 futuristic abstract fable drawing on Italian “grammelot” and wide-ranging vocal techniques. Another recent work is Vespers (walking in beauty) for mixed chorus and wind ensemble.

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, Matthias Pintscher, Paul Chihara, Toshio Hosokawa, Linda Dusman, Eliot Britton, Rahilia Hasanova, 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.

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