“Searing 45-minute music drama” Washington Post
“Unmissable” NY Observer
“…lovely and evanescent” San Francisco Chronicle
“eloquent, impersonal and…wrenchingly powerful” Gramophone
“a composer of vivid imagination and skill” Fanfare
The music of Susan Kander has been heard throughout the United States and in cities around the world, including London, Paris, Mexico City, Lima, Birmingham, Vancouver, Melbourne, Cape Town, St. Petersburg, Kuhmo and Guangzhou. Her newest work, Melodies Lost and Found for chamber septet, was commissioned with a generous grant from Chamber Music America for newEar Chamber Ensemble and will premier in May 2025.
Kander has received opera commissions from Opera Minnesota, Opera Theater of St. Louis, Lyric Opera of Kansas City, and Columbus Opera as well as numerous chamber music ensembles and soloists. Dwb (driving while black), written with Roberta Gumbel, librettist, and premiered in 2020 during the Covid pandemic in a streamed video co-presented by Baruch PAC, New York and Opera Omaha. It has since enjoyed nine productions across America with a tenth coming October 2025.
In 2019, she teamed up again with co-librettist Roberta Gumbel to begin work on Carry My Own Suitcase, a chamber opera about a young man with autism and his family. With generous grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Virginia B. Toulmin Fund at Opera America, Suitcase enjoyed a very successful workshop production at University of Kansas in March 2023 directed by Linda Brand and music directed by Jacob Ashworth.
Kander’s adaptation of the seminal dystopian novel The Giver by Lois Lowry was commissioned by Minnesota Opera and Lyric Opera of Kansas City. Knight Arts, St. Paul, called it a “remarkable new work…. sophisticated and subtle.” Never Lost a Passenger, about Harriet Tubman and black abolitionist William Still, was commissioned by Lyric Opera of Kansas City and subsequently produced by nine opera companies, many of them in multiple years. Passenger has the distinction of having provided Young Artist roles for tenors Russell Thomas and Nathan Granner. Roberta Gumbel created the title role, beginning a creative relationship with Kander that spans over twenty-five years. One False Move, about girl bullying, also commissioned by Lyric Opera of Kansas City, has been produced by at least fourteen different companies and schools, including in South Africa and China.
Kander’s special passion for text setting helped her through the Covid years, resulting in the publication of First Person, Second Person, Third Person Singular, a collection of sixteen songs and arias setting text from 1669 to today.
Miranda’s Waltz for narrator and orchestra, commissioned and premiered in 2009 by the National Symphony Orchestra, was programmed and live-streamed around the world in 2017 by the Australian Discovery Orchestra. Another NSO commission, The Donkey, the Goat and the Little Dog, an original fable for string quartet, was greeted by The Washington Post as “the first all-talking, all-acting, in-motion string quartet…often hilarious…hugely enjoyable.” Her 2009 solo bassoon commission The Lunch Counter, a character study in seven movements, has begun to show up on excerpt lists for graduate programs. Her 2013 work, Hermestänze for violin and piano, commissioned by Jacob Ashworth, violinist (also her son), is a rare example of a large-scale dramatic cycle written for the violin. “Kander’s study of Apollo, another god of music, is raptly serene.” Gramophone
She is especially proud to have had her Solo Sonata for violin-viola-violin (on the Hermestänze album) performed in 2004 by commissioner Yuval Waldman during the White Nights festival in the fabled Composers’ Forum in St. Petersburg, Russia. So many ghosts!
Kander received her B.A. in Music at Harvard in 1979 but was a playwright until “coming home to music” in the early1990’s. (Finding herself in a small village in France during a six-month stay, she wrote an opera for her sons’ elementary school on their two-and-a-half octave yellow Playskool piano. There was no turning back.) In 2015, after composing busily for over twenty-years, she decided to blow things up by finally attending graduate school in composition. She studied with Du Yun and Huang Ruo at Purchase Conservatory, re-arranging the furniture in her mind and earning her M.M. in Composition in 2017. Her favorite part of graduate school was experiencing music through the ears and minds of the younger students in the department. She has been an invited blogger for New Music Box. Her music has been recorded on the Albany, MSR, Navona and Loose Cans labels. Her publisher is Subito Music Corp. She is a Fellow of the MacDowell Colony and lives in New York.