Gilda Lyons

b. 1975

Gilda Lyons, composer, vocalist, and visual artist, combines elements of renaissance, neo-baroque, spectral, folk, agitprop Music Theater, and extended vocalism to create works of uncompromising emotional honesty and melodic beauty. Her music is "hair-raising, yet elegant [with] slides, dips, yips and yelps amid ceremonial intensity" (Tom Strini, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel) and “sounds like nothing you've ever heard before” (Gregory Berg, Journal of Singing).

Sing for Hope featured Lyons’ “Hold On” on their most recent release, An AIDS Quilt Songbook, available on iTunes and GPR Records. Lindsey Goodman’s tour de force performance of Lyons’ “Chrysalis” will be released on New Dynamic Records in 2015. Recent premieres in Beijing, Tokyo, Seattle, New York, and Pittsburgh include “walk, run, fly” (voice / pre-recorded sound; The Flea Theater, NYC), “Lady Beetle” (koto solo; Yumi Kurosawa, Toriphony Hall, Tokyo), “Moonlight Suite” (chamber opera; Opera Theater of Pittsburgh), and “La Novia de Tola” (piano trio; Beijing New Music Ensemble, Beijing; Finisterra Trio, Seattle; Entelechron, NYC).

Currently writing a mainstage opera for Opera Theater of Pittsburgh with a libretto by Tammy Ryan, she is also completing large-scale commissions for Mirror Visions Ensemble, IonSound, and Panic Duo. Her music is published by Schott, E.C. Schirmer and Burning Sled. Dr. Lyons currently teaches composition at The Hartt School, University of Hartford, and at the Wintergreen Summer Music Academy. She serves as Artistic and Executive Director of The Phoenix Concerts, New York's “intrepid” and "plucky Upper West Side new-music series" (The New Yorker).