Abbie Betinis
artist in residence / alto section leader
Abbie has loved experimenting with sound since age 3, when her parents – singing in the car – heard an excited squeal from the backseat: “I holded my own hawmony!” Now her catalog of over sixty commissioned works includes projects for the American Suzuki Foundation, Cantus, Dale Warland Singers, James Sewell Ballet, The Rose Ensemble, Young New Yorkers’ Chorus, and Zeitgeist.
A language enthusiast with a penchant for research, Abbie enjoys exploring the world through music, leading her to incorporate into her projects elements from early American shape-note singing, Chinese compassion mantras, ancient Greek binding spells, Gaelic keening, Japanese origami, and – in an extended piece for women’s voices with cello, oud, and Persian hand drums – the mysticism of 14th c. Sufism.
Abbie also enjoys the collaborative process. After completing Nautilus Music-Theater’s Composer-Librettist Studio, where five composers and five librettists study the art of collaboration, she co-created the ballet Ribcage with soprano Carrie Henneman Shaw, electric guitarist Jesse Langen, and the James Sewell Ballet. She and poet Michael Dennis Browne have also recently worked together to create an origami-inspired piece entitled A Blessing of Cranes for the American Choral Directors Association’s Commission Consortium.
A two-time McKnight Artist Fellow, Abbie has also received the American Composers Forum's Subito and Encore grants, Craig and Janet Swan Composer Prize, Esoterics’ Polyphonos Young Composer Prize, and awards from Donne in Musica(Italy), Minnesota Music Educators Association, and New York’s Sorel Organization, among others. In 2011, she was selected by NPR Music and New York’s WQXR Public Radio in their list of "100 Composers Under 40." Her song cycle “Nattsanger (Nightsongs)” for soprano, clarinet and piano won an Honorable Mention in ASCAP’s Morton Gould Young Composer Awards and is released on the Naxos label.
Minnesota Public Radio has recorded and produced Abbie’s annual Christmas carol since 2001, and National Public Radio and Public Radio International have aired her music in performances by the Dale Warland Singers, Philadelphia Singers and The Rose Ensemble. Abbie is one of the artists profiled in the Twin Cities Public Television documentary “Never Stop Singing,” which won an Upper Midwest Regional Emmy Award.
Abbie’s music is published by Graphite Publishing, Hal Leonard, Kjos, in G. Schirmer’s Dale Warland Series, and by her own venture, Abbie Betinis Music Co, which she founded in 2006 to distribute her sheet music internationally straight from her studio in Saint Paul. A strong proponent of small business and cooperative models, she co-founded the Independent Music Publishers Cooperative (IMP) in 2012, and served as its president for its first four years. Through cross-marketing campaigns with IMP's other small publishers, Abbie’s music was performed last year on five continents, totaling over 400 performances.
In 2015, Abbie was a resident composer at the Zodiac Music Festival in the French Alps, where she wrote for the Zodiac Trio. In 2016, clarinetist Michael Collins and pianist Michael McHale premiered her "Rhapsodos" on The Schubert Club’s International Artist Series in Saint Paul.
Abbie is a graduate of the Suzuki piano program in her hometown of Stevens Point, Wisconsin, holds a B.A. in music from St. Olaf College, M.A. in music composition from the University of Minnesota, and has done post-graduate work in Paris, France on scholarship from the European American Musical Alliance, where she studied harmony and counterpoint in the tradition of Nadia Boulanger with Philip Lasser and Narcis Bonet.
A three-time cancer survivor, Abbie lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota, where she is Adjunct Professor of Composition at Concordia University, Composer-in-Residence for The Schubert Club, and the newest member of the doo-wop quartet The Fairlanes, where she sings high tenor.