Described as "taut, focused… colourful" by Gramophone, "mesmerizing," by critic Tim Smith, and "especially glorious… ethereal" by Whole Note, the music of Canadian composer Tawnie Olson draws inspiration from politics, spirituality, the natural world, and the musicians for whom she composes.
Her opera Sanctuary and Storm (libretto by Roberta Barker) is the winner of the 2021-2023 National Opera Association Dominick Argento Chamber Opera Competition. Olson is also the winner of the 2018 Barlow Prize, a consortium commission for the BYU Singers, The Crossing, and Seraphic Fire, and of a 2019 Copland House Residency Award. In 2018 she was the Composer-in-Residence of the Women Composers Festival of Hartford and an American Composers Forum BandQuest Composer-in-Residence at E.C. Adams School in Guilford, CT, and received a Connecticut Artist Fellowship. In 2017, she received an OPERA America Discovery Grant to develop a new work with re:Naissance Opera (libretto by Roberta Barker), and a Canada Council for the Arts Professional Development Grant to study field recording at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Olson has been commissioned by the International Double Reed Society, the Canadian Art Song Project, Third Practice/New Music USA, the Canada Council for the Arts, Mount Holyoke College/The Women’s Philharmonic, the Blue Water Chamber Orchestra, Ithaca College, the American Composers Forum, and the Yale Institute of Sacred Music’s Robert Baker Commissioning Fund, among others. Her scores are available from the Canadian Music Centre, E.C. Schirmer, Galaxy Music, Hal Leonard's BandQuest and Mark Foster series, and Oxford University Press.
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