Susan Teresa Botti (born April 13, 1962) is an American soprano opera singer and composer of contemporary classical music. Originally working in theater, she studied classical music at the Berklee College of Music and Manhattan School of Music, and she began a career as a librettist, with her work including Wonderglass (1993) and Telaio: Desdemona (1995). She has also performed as an opera singer for composer Tan Dun.
After doing a piece inspired by the Lewis Carroll poem "Jabberwocky", she wrote Wonderglass, an opera inspired by Alice in Wonderland;[7] it premiered in 1993 at the Cranbrook American Artist Series, as did another opera, Telaio: Desdemona, in 1995.[8] According to Mark Stryker of the Detroit Free Press, Botti's music composition "draws on several idioms โ classical, theatrical, world music โ without resorting to pastiche or cliches and without mortgaging a razor-sharp wit", and while "her vocal writing is unpredictable, [...] the gestures, particularly when voiced by her own silvery soprano, have a striking lyric thrust".[8]
In 2001, she performed her own composition EchoTempo at Avery Fisher Hall; this was the first time a composition at a regular New York Philharmonic subscription concert featured its own composer as a vocalist.[5] She was the 2003-2005 Daniel R. Lewis Young Composer Fellow at the Cleveland Orchestra.[3] In 2005, she was awarded a Frederic A. Juilliard/Walter Damrosch Rome Prize in music composition.[11] In 2006,[12] she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in music composition.[2] She was one of nine composers profiled in the 2011 book Women of Influence in Contemporary Music.[13]
In 2000, she joined the University of Michigan as Assistant Professor of Music Composition.[2] She left UMich in 2006 and moved to the composition faculty at MSM.[14] By 2021, her work at MSM was part-time.[15] She also works at Vassar College as an adjunct associate professor.[14]
She has also been involved in commercial work, particularly Kodak's 1988 "True Colors" Olympic jingle, which she took in order to pay for her graduate studies;[6] the soundtrack for the 2000 science fiction film Mission to Mars;[6] and a minor acting role in the crime drama Spenser For Hire.[4]
On August 20, 1988, she married Roland Vazquez, a fellow MSM alumnus and later a Latin jazz musician whom she is also a colloborator, at Amasa Stone Chapel in Cleveland, Ohio;[1][15] they have two children.[15] They lived in Italy after she became a Rome Fellow, before moving to Red Hook, New York in the 2010s.[15][3]