User:Mdalton18/sandbox

= Catherine Dalton (composer) = Catherine Dalton (born August 20, 1963) is an American composer. She specializes in vocal compositions that are inspired by classical, jazz, folk, world music and chant. She is best known for choral music, but has also recently expanded into musical-theater.

Biography
Born in Greeley, Colorado, Dalton's family finally settled in Willmar, Minnesota. She received a Bachelors of Arts from Hamline University in Physics and Computer Science in 1885. After traveling Asia with her future husband and work in Museum Education at the Boston Museum of Science, she returned to school to pursue a Masters in Education at the University of Louisville. She taught Middle School science for a few years before taking time out to raise her young daughters. Following the adoption of her son from Vietnam, Dalton began composing music.

Notable composition teachers include Mary Ellen Childs, Elizabeth Alexander, and Gregory Theisen. In addition, she has studied song writing with Peter Mayer, piano with Reese Allison and Kathy Krueger, and voice with Barbara McAfee, Janice Porter, and Jeannie Brindley-Barnett.

She resides in Mahtomedi, Minnesota with her husband, two of three kids, two cats, and one very needy dog. She currently sings with One Voice Mixed Chorus, Harmonia, and OVation. 

Music
Dalton's work has been described as "atmospheric, " "haunting, " and "evocative ". Performed by professional choirs, college choirs, high school choirs, children's choirs, and church choirs across the United States and Europe, as well as groups as Vox Femina Los Angeles, Aurora Chorus, Camerata Nova, and the new music ensemble Zeitgeist, and singers Carrie Henneman-Shaw, Jeffrey Hess and Nicole Warner, Dalton is clearly a rising star.

Her catalog of 30 published works includes commissions for Amuse Singers, the College of Musical Arts for the Bowling Green State University Women's Chorus, the Mahtomedi High School Varsity Choir, Mahtomedi High School Women’s Choir, Champlin Park High School Treble Choir, Global Harmony Community Chorus, Community of Peace Academy High School Chorus, Mahtomedi High School Jazz I, and O.H. Anderson Elementary School.

Dalton’s choral works have been selected for National American Choral Directors (ACDA) and Unitarian Universalist Musicians Network (UUMN) Reading Sessions. She was selected to participate in Nautilus Music-Theater’s Composer-Librettist Studio and the Lehigh Composers Institute, was the winner of MacPhail’ s Composition Scholarship and has received awards and grants from the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council (MRAC), Meet the Composer MetLife Creative Connections, and the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP).

On November 5, 2017, Dalton premiered her first evening length work, Walking Together. Walking Together combines text and music into a celebration of diversity which explores the intertwined topics of migration, immigration, race, and ethnicity. While premiered in her hometown of Mahtomedi, Walking Together is designed to travel to different communities, with new groups of readers and community-building activities each time.

Her newest project, Bluets, based on the book by Maggie Nelson of the same name, will be a multi-genre evening length production incorporating musical-theater/opera, film, and dance. Bluets was first performed in February, 2017, is part of a Nautilus Music-Theater Rough Cuts in December 2018, will have a staging workshop in January, 2019, and a full-production in 2020.