Biography
Eleanor Trawick’s compositions include instrumental and vocal chamber works, orchestral music, and both arrangements and original compositions for chorus. She composes in a variety of styles: music for amateur and student performers tends to be melodic and to emphasize triadic and other tertian harmonies, though in a post-tonal context, while music intended for professional soloists and ensembles has a modernist orientation. She employs both traditional and innovative musical forms, often infused with canon and other contrapuntal devices.
When writing commissioned compositions, Trawick likes to work closely with performers to produce pieces tailored to their musical preferences and technical strengths. When setting text, she appreciates the opportunity for a different sort of collaboration—that between music and words—and her vocal and choral settings strive to respect the form and meaning of the original. She has set poetry and prose by a broad selection of authors, including Shakespeare, William Blake, Emily Dickinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Sarah Bolton, as well as a number of pieces by her father, poet and librettist Leonard Trawick.
In 2005 Trawick’s oratorio, The Hammer of Los, received its premiere at Ball State University, and she was commissioned by the Music Teachers National Association and the Indiana Music Teachers Association to compose a solo piano work, Tattoo, which premiered in November.
Born in New York City in 1965, Eleanor Trawick grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, and received early training at the Cleveland Institute of Music. She earned a B.A. from Columbia University and a Ph.D. in composition from the State University of New York at Buffalo, where her teachers included Louis Andriessen, David Felder, Lukas Foss, Frederic Rzewski, and Charles Wuorinen. A music theorist as well as a composer, she is an associate professor and the head of the composition and theory division of the School of Music at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. She directs the choir of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Muncie and plays the viola as a chamber musician, soloist, and member of the Muncie Symphony Orchestra. Currently she is working on a textbook treating the theory and analysis of contemporary music.
