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Lisa Rainsong

Lisa Rainsong's musical life integrates composition, vocal performance, natural history, and education. She was appointed to the CIM Music Theory faculty in 2000, and teaches undergraduate and graduate theory courses. She also is Coordinator of the Doctor of Musical Arts program.

Rainsong holds a DMA in Composition from the Cleveland Institute of Music, where she studied with Margaret Brouwer. Her undergraduate and master's degrees in composition are from Cleveland State University, where she studied with Bain Murray, Edwin London, and Howie Smith. She is a member of ASCAP and the Cleveland Composers Guild.

She is particularly interested in writing for solo voice, vocal ensembles, and mixed chamber ensembles of voices and instruments, and her vocal music includes numerous pieces that are settings of her own texts. Her catalog of works includes instrumental pieces ranging from solo instruments to full orchestra. Her commissions of both secular and sacred works include many from churches and choral ensembles in Northeast Ohio.

A soprano as well as a composer, Rainsong is an active performer of medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque music as a soloist and a choral musician. As a soprano soloist Rainsong performs recitals featuring 17th century solo song repertoire and is the soprano soloist in Ensemble Lautenkonzert. She is also a choral musician active in several ensembles including Quire Cleveland, and Apollo’s Singers (the chorus of Cleveland Baroque Orchestra Apollo’s Fire),

In addition to composition and performance, she is also a naturalist who especially enjoys teaching about the earth’s first music: bird song, insect song, and the songs of amphibians and mammals. She completed her Naturalist Certificate at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History in 2008. She now teaches classes on bird song identification and leads educational hikes for the Holden Arboretum, the Geauga Park District, the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, the Nature Center at Shaker Lakes, and the Twinsburg Parks. She has been awarded a grant by the Geauga Park District to survey two of their newest preserves for crickets and katydids – survey work that includes a great deal of insect song identification.

Additional information on her music, performing, and teaching can be found at www.lisarainsong.com.

E-mail: lisa.rainsong@case.edu

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