individual artist career development

For pioneering NYC composer, bandleader, and multi-instrumentalist Kitty Brazelton, music is personal, and the personal is universal. Brazelton has connected language and practice across expectation since the 1970s when she led avant-folk-chamber Musica Orbis, to the ‘80s fronting Hide the Babies at CBGB’s, to the ‘90s and ‘00s with ensembles DADADAH, Hildegurls, and What Is it Like to Be a Bat? and operas Fireworks and Animal Tales. The 2020 pandemic saw her take on an ambitious choir recording project titled the world is not ending—we’ve been here before, enlisting dozens of out-of-work musicians to sing messages of hope together remotely from their homes. Interviewed in 2020 for inclusion in Yale’s Oral History of American Music, Brazelton has won OPERA America’s 2015 & 2016 Grants for Female Composers, the Copland, the Ossietzky, and a 2021 NYSCA grant for her opera Art of Memory, with commissions including “O Joy!” for choir VocalEssence’s NPR quadrennial and “Fierce Grace” for Opera America—which premiered in 2017 at the Library of Congress. New York Times writes: “brilliant”; Los Angeles Times: “boisterous”; Rolling Stone: “impressive nerve”; John Zorn: “visionary”. Prior to COVID, Brazelton produced hybrid string concerts in LA, a cappella prayer cycles in private homes, and band festivals in NYC, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Vermont.