Ellen Mandel

In 21st Century, Composers, Female composers by Vogler & Lindqvist3 Comments

“A wonderful musician.”Dizzy Gillespie

While Ellen studied classical piano through high school, she also tried to recreate Ray Charles’ piano style, listening to his records in her room and then running downstairs to the piano.

At Harvard, she fell in love with lieder listening to Hermann Prey, and earned her B.A. in Philosophy with a thesis about aesthetic expression, specifically what exactly happens when a singer performs a song. After college, Ellen found her way to playing and writing music— jazzy pop tunes, music for ballet and modern dance, music for theater from improv comedy to Greek tragedy to Shakespeare and Stoppard. In the 90’s a friend, tenor Daniel Pociernicki, commissioned her to set four poems of E.E. Cummings. Since then she’s written songs to poems by Cummings, Seamus Heaney, WB Yeats, Wallace Stevens, Thomas Hardy, and others, while continuing to compose frequently for theater. Recently, Ellen realized that she’s doing what she wrote about in her thesis: playing and composing music.

Ellen has three art song CDs: a wind has blown the rain away, the first of all my dreams, and The Cat and the Moon. Every Play’s an Opera collects her theatre music. Dizzy Gillespie called her “a wonderful musician.” The NY Times called her art songs “Ardent, spiky, and refreshingly organic.” Here’s her website for more infos: ellenmandel.com

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Comments

  1. Hello James Andres, Helene is right—-you can come to my website, and order scores directly from me! Always happy to be in touch with singers and all who are interested in my music! Here’s the link: http://ellenmandel.com

    THANKS to Helene and Philipp for performing and recording my songs so beautifully!

    Ellen M

  2. Author

    Hi, great to hear from you! We are working on an edition of selected songs of this site, hopefully we’ll be getting it out there soon. You can get the songs of Ellen Mandel by contacting her personally via her website: ellenmandel.com. Tell her Helene sent you 🙂

  3. i love this site, but is there an easy way to find/purchase scores of the songs one likes (ie ellen mandel shy one).

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