Sara Doncaster
composer

Sara Doncaster is the director of the Warebrook Contemporary Music Festival in Irasburg, Vermont. She is a recipient of a Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Citation of Merit from the Vermont Arts Council for Distinguished Service to the Arts.

Sara's work has been recognized by fellowships from the Ragdale Foundation, the Composers Conference at Wellesley College, the MacDowell Colony, the Millay Colony for the Arts (Jean & Louis Dreyfus Foundation Endowed Fellowship), the Corporation of Yaddo, The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the June in Buffalo Composition Seminar. Other awards include ASCAP Standard Awards and production assistance grants from the Vermont Community Foundation Arts Endowment Fund and the American Composers Forum - New England Chapter.

Sara's music has been performed by the Dinosaur Annex Music Ensemble, the Lydian String Quartet, Vermont Contemporary Music Ensemble, Susan Davenny Wyner (conductor), David Hoose (conductor), Jon Garrison (tenor), the Master Singers, the Auros Group for New Music, Village Harmony, St. Paul's Episcopal Cathedral (Burlington, VT), Social Band, Village Harmony, and the Composers Conference at Wellesley College, among others.

Mrs. Doncaster's catalogue of works includes music for voice and piano, chamber music for mixed ensembles from three to ten players, choral works and larger-scale compositions for voice and chamber ensemble, including Biblical Sonnets for baritone and 14 instruments. Recent works include Supernatural Songs, a song cycle of 12 poems by William Butler Yeats for tenor, three sopranos and 13 instruments; a choral setting of Edward Lear's poem "The Quangle-Wangle's Hat"; and the Great "O" Antiphons for Advent (SATB chorus). She is a 2005 - 06 recipient of an Opportunity - Artist Development Grant from the Vermont Arts Council to support the completion of the piano/vocal score of her first opera, "Coriander and a Penny's Worth of Lonesome" with librettist Ronald Falzone.

Sara lives in Vermont. She is a graduate of Boston University (B. Music, Theory & Composition / Piano Performance) and Brandeis University (M.A., Theory & Composition). Her principal composition teachers are Allen Anderson, Martin Boykan, Charles Fussell and Yehudi Wyner. In September, Sara successfully presented the defense of her dissertation projects for the Ph.D. in Theory & Composition at Brandeis University. Her analysis paper is titled "Formal Process in Seymour Shifrin's String Quartet No. 4." Supernatural Songs, her dissertation composition, was premiered at the 2005 Warebrook Contemporary Music Festival.

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