3.9 - Dawn Sonntag
Olympia, Washington based composer Dawn Sonntag’s music has been called “hauntingly lyrical,” “profound,” and “freshly relevant.” Her works have been performed by ensembles and soloists across the U.S. and in Europe, including Burning River Baroque, the Delgani Quartet, the Ensign Chorus and Orchestra in Seattle, the Cleveland Chamber Chorus, the Choral Arts Ensemble of Portland, the Fairbanks Summer Arts Festival Orchestra, the Cleveland Opera Theater, and many more.
Her art songs have been widely performed in recital and are included in recordings by sopranos Michelle Murray Viertek (Every Tiny Thing) and Megan Ihnen (Currents in Time) and by Burning River Baroque duo Malina Rauschenfels and Paula Most, who commissioned the cycle Loves Poems in the Time of Climate Change. Her music has been broadcast on public radio in Ohio and Oregon and is published by Carl Fischer, North Star Music, and Dagny Press.
ased on the true story East Prussian refugees during World War II, Sonntag’s first opera, Verlorene Heimat (Lost Homeland), was awarded Honorable Mention in the 2021 American Prize for Opera, Musical Theater, Dance, and Film composition. Her opera For Life, with a libretto by Harvard-trained psychologist Kermit Cole, was commissioned for the Cleveland Opera’s Operas in Place Festival, which won the 2023 Opera America Award for Digital Excellence in Artistic Creation.
Sonntag was selected as the Commissioned Composer of the Year for the Music Teachers National Association state chapters in both Ohio (2010) and Washington State (2021). She won the Inge Pitler Prize for lied performance in both piano (1998) and voice (1999). As winner of the Kenwood Symphony Masters Concerto and Aria competition in Minneapolis, she performed the orchestrated art songs of Edvard Grieg.
Sonntag has been the recipient of an American-Scandinavian Foundation grant; a Foreign Language Area Studies fellowship to study advanced Norwegian in Oslo, Norway; and a Swedish government international cultural fellowship as a resident composer at the International Centre for Composers in Visby, Sweden.
She has conducted college, university, community, and church choirs across the U.S. and in Germany and Norway, including the Heidelberg International Choir; the Chor des Collegium Artium in Heidelberg; the Oslo International Summer School Choir; the Leif Eriksson International Choir in Minneapolis; and the Hiram College Chamber Singers and Western Reserve Women’s Chorus, which she founded. Sonntag has also conducted orchestral works as a participant in European conducting master classes in Berlin and Bacau, Rumania.
Sonntag holds a Doctor of Musical Arts Degree from the University of Minnesota, where she studied composition with Alex Lubet, voice with Wendy Zaro, and choral conducting with Kathy Salzman Romey. She received her Master of Music at Ohio State University under the tutelage of Hilary Apfelstadt, conducting, Eileen Davis, voice, and Seymour Fink, piano.
A self-taught pianist until the age of eighteen, she began studying trumpet at age nine. She completed most of her undergraduate work at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, studying trumpet with Wayne Cook, piano with Armand Basile, voice performance with Yolanda Marculescu, and collaborative piano with Jeffrey Peterson, counterpoint with John Downey, and choral arranging with Yehuda Yanay while working as a pianist for the Milwaukee Ballet, conducting church choirs, and teaching privately. After relocating to San Antonio and then El Paso, Texas, she completed her Bachelor of Music in voice performance at the University of Texas at El Paso.
Currently Sonntag is Director of Music at Westminster Presbyterian Church and a teaches music composition at Pacific Lutheran University. She has served on the faculties of Gonzaga University, where she taught music theory and composition; the University of St. Catherine in St. Paul, Minnesota, where she taught music theory and accompanied the choir; and Hiram College, where she served as Department Chair for several years and taught composition, theory, private lessons in voice, piano, and composition, music history, music entrepreneurship, study abroad courses, and conducted the choirs. She also held graduate teaching assistantships at the University of Minnesota and the Ohio State University. In Germany, she taught English as a Second Language at several language schools, including the Volkshochschule Heidelberg and the Heidelberg Institut für Fremdsprache. She also has extensive experience as a church musician.
In addition to her activities as a composer and performer, Sonntag has been actively involved in environmental and human rights advocacy. Her successful battle to stop a Washington State commission from building a mega airport in rural Western Washington is described in her forthcoming book, Nothing but Trees. She is an avid hiker, cyclist, and kayaker.
https://dawnsonntag.com
