Bio for
Sarah Meneely-Kyder ~

Composer/pianist Sarah Meneely-Kyder is a graduate of Goucher College, Peabody Conservatory and Yale University.  Her composition teachers have included Robert Hall Lewis, Earle Brown, and Robert Morris.  In the years following her formal education in Western musical tradition, she studied the North Indian sitar and was eventually initiated by Roop Verma, a student of world renowned sitarist, Ravi Shankar. As a composer, she is noted for pieces that fuse disparate musical elements and traditions into unified works. She is a member of American Composers Alliance, New York Women Composers, and she was a founding member of Connecticut Composers Inc. Her creative endeavors have been rewarded with many commissions, grants, and prizes including Yale University's Rena Greenwald Memorial Prize and several Artist Project Grants from the Connecticut Commission on the Arts.  She has two CD recordings on the NORTH/SOUTH RECORDING, INC. label, the second of which was nominated for a Grammy award in December of 2003. In March and April of 2006, Sarah organized and performed in two performances of the music of Ann Silsbee and music set to her poetry by members of New York Women Composers  in Ithaca, NY and  in New York City.  Recent commissions include a work for Friends of Voce, (Soprano/Clarinet/Piano) which was premiered in February of, 2008 and a work for choral ensemble Voce (S-A-T-B/Piano) to be premiered in February of 2009.  Sarah has been working in collaboration with poet (and sister) Nancy Fitz-Hugh Meneely on a War Oratorio  which depicts the life of her father during and following his experience as a doctor in the Tenth Mountain Division in WW 11.  She is published in the Dictionary of Contemporary Music, edited by John Vinton, and she has an entry on her music in the revised edition of Baker's Biographical Dictionary, edited by Nicholas Slonimsky.
 
Sarah is on the faculty of Wesleyan University where she teaches piano, chamber music and composition.

Contact Info for
Sarah Meneely-Kyder ~

Sarah Meneely-Kyder
Composer/Pianist
Wesleyan University/Neighborhood Music School

860-434-8946

Email Sarah or call to commission works or schedule performances.