Biography

"For better or worse, I don't come from the academy, I come from the theater where if you lose your audience you're dead. So in any composition, in any style or venue, I try to bring the audience along with me wherever I'm going."

Having graduated from Harvard University in 1979 with a degree in music, Susan spent the next 15 years working as a playwright before "coming home" to full time composition. Since then, she has been commissioned by a wide range of performers and ensembles resulting in a growing catalog of vocal, chamber, and choral works characterized by a vivid, often chromatic tonal presence and rhythmic immediacy. Her most recently completed commission is a "symphonic adventure" for the National Symphony Orchestra entitled Miranda's Waltz, with original story and text by youth theater expert Mary Hall Surface. Rather than serve as another introduction to individual instruments, the piece displays the versatility of the orchestra as a whole, and specifically celebrates the contributions of American sounds and styles of the last century or so. (See NEWS for more about Miranda's Waltz.) It premiers May 31, 2009 at the Kennedy Center.

Another frequent hallmark of Kander's work is a theatrical orientation. The Lunch Counter, a 2007 commission for solo bassoon, is subtitled "A musical play in seven movements," and described by the composer as presenting seven "character studies." It will premiere in Pittsburgh in 2009. Five Movements for my Father, for baritone and chamber ensemble, essentially a thirty minute one man opera, has been praised for its "exceptional interweaving of melodic lines and textures." (NY Concert Review.) Pas de Deux for clarinet, cello and chimes has "an advanced touch for counterpoint and harmony - with an inventive exploration of interval relationship and voice crossing." (NY Concert Review) A Cycle of Songs for soprano or mezzo, trumpet or clarinet and piano is another theatrical chamber work, recently staged with the addition of two dancers. These last three works are on Kander's CD Five Movements for my Father, (Loose Cans Music) released in January 2008.

Solo Sonata for violin-viola-violin, her first composition after 9/11, was commissioned and premiered by Yuval Waldman both in New York and at the celebrated Composer's Union in St. Petersburg, Russia. Museum Pieces, for string quartet and bassoon, was described as "patently sexual, with a shimmering viola solo," by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Her close ties to musical theatre led her, in Two Tricky Tales, for narrator and chamber ensemble, commissioned by the Southampton Chamber Music Festival, to feature the kind of exciting doubling on clarinets and trumpets routinely found in a Broadway pit but rarely showcased in the classical world. The News from Poems, "a richly varied group of William Carlos Williams settings" (Kansas City Star) commissioned by the Grammy Award-winning Kansas City Chorale has led Ms. Kander to begin development of a full-length opera about Williams, the New Jersey doctor and poet. She recently completed the first act libretto while a resident at the MacDowell Colony.

Susan is also nationally recognized as a leading composer in the field of youth opera. The most recent, One False Move, conceived and commissioned by Paula Winans at Lyric Opera of Kansas City, about what have since come to be called "mean girls," has not only been done all over this country but internationally as well, including by Capetown Opera in a variety of schools and townships. Never Lost a Passenger, also commissioned by Lyric Opera of Kansas City, has introduced children across the nation to the story of Harriet Tubman and the Underground Rail Road. Other works for young audiences include The Donkey, the Goat and the Little Dog, commissioned by the National Symphony Orchestra in 2006. Described by Kander as the "first all-talking, all-acting, in-motion string quartet," the Washington Post called it "a friendly, pain-free and often hilarious introduction to the string quartet for the 4-and-older crowd…. hugely enjoyable, ending (as all dramas properly should) with everyone eating ice cream together. The audience showed its approval with clapping, emphatic squeals and much bouncing in the seats."

Current commissions include a chamber work for oboe and piano for the Fiala/Speers duo, to premier in July at the International Double Reed Society annual convention and a choral work for the Young People's Chorus of New York. Publisher Boosey and Hawkes maintains her opera catalogue; vocal, chamber, orchestral and choral music are published by Subito Music.