About Cecilia

Canadian composer Cecilia Livingston specializes in music for voice. She is composer-in-residence at Glyndebourne Festival Opera, where her work is supported by the Canada Council for the Arts and builds on her 2015-17 Fellowship at The American Opera Project in New York. She is a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Postdoctoral Fellow in Music at King's College London.

Winner of the 2018 Mécénat Musica Prix 3 Femmes for female opera creators, the Canadian Music Centre’s Toronto Emerging Composer Award, and a finalist in the Johanna Metcalf Performing Arts Prizes, her music has been heard at Nuit Blanche, the 21C Festival, World Choir Games, Bang on a Can Summer Festival, Soundstreams, Fashion Art Toronto, Tapestry Opera, and with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, the Kingston Symphony, and Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra. Her recent song-cycle chamber opera Singing Only Softly, inspired by the life of Anne Frank, premiered in 2019 (https://www.singingonlysoftly.com). Her current projects include the opera Terror & Erebus for Opera 5 and TorQ Percussion Quartet (https://terroranderebus.com), as well as new work for Glyndebourne and a song cycle with Orange Prize winning poet Anne Michaels for Women on the Verge.

She has published on contemporary opera in The Opera Quarterly, Cambridge Opera Journal, and Tempo (Cambridge), and has presented at the Royal Musical Association and American  Musicological Society annual conferences. She is a National Councillor of the Canadian League of Composers and a member of the Ontario Regional Council of the Canadian Music Centre. She holds a doctorate in composition from the University of Toronto.