and everything that
sings in the carbon of stone and bone
like a page of love, wind-lost from a hand, unread.
– Anne Michaels, ‘There Is No City That Does Not Dream’ (from Skin Divers)
“a radiant and openhearted
musical language”
Cecilia Livingston specializes in music for voice. She is composer-in-residence at the Canadian Opera Company (2022-) and was composer-in-residence at Glyndebourne (2019-2022). Her music is driven by melody, mixing styles to create work that is lyrical and unsettling.
Cecilia’s residencies at the COC and Glyndebourne build on her two-year fellowship at The American Opera Project in New York. Her music has been heard at Glyndebourne, Teatro Colón, Teatro Carlo Felice, Bang on a Can’s summer festival, Toronto’s Nuit Blanche festival, in recital at Koerner Hall, Carnegie Hall, the Barbican, and the Kennedy Center, with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, Canada’s National Arts Centre Orchestra, Tafelmusik, and Soundstreams, and is available on recording from Deutsche Grammophon.
“[music that asks] slow burning, sometimes fiery questions”
Current projects include an orchestral song cycle with Orange Prize winning poet Anne Michaels and new work for the Canadian Opera Company. Her creative work is supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, the Toronto Arts Council, and SOCAN Foundation.
In the summer of 2022 Cecilia joined the faculty at the Banff Centre’s Opera in the 21st Century program, and she is Vice-President of the Canadian League of Composers and an associate composer of the Canadian Music Centre.
She was a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Postdoctoral Fellow in Music at King's College London and her articles and reviews have appeared in Tempo, the Cambridge Opera Journal, The Opera Quarterly, and forthcoming in The Cambridge Companion to Composition. She has given papers on contemporary opera at the Royal Musical Association, American Musicological Society, and Modern Language Association (MLA) annual conferences; in 2024 she was appointed to the MLA Forum Executive Committee on Opera and Musical Performance for a five-year term. She holds a doctorate in composition from the University of Toronto, where she was awarded the Theodoros Mirkopoulos Fellowship in Composition.
Cecilia is represented by Stratagem Artists in New York.
“this vast and curious creative mind”