Composer Karen Siegel creates innovative, exciting, and meaningful choral and vocal works. Her works are frequently performed by the New York City-based ensemble C4: the Choral Composer/Conductor Collective, which she co-founded in 2005. Her opera The Hat: Arendt Meets Heidegger, with librettist Zsuzsanna Ardó, premiered at the Pride Arts Center in Chicago with Thompson Street Opera in 2019. Karen's works are featured on albums by the Harmonium Choral Society, the Choir of Trinity College Melbourne, Tonality, and C4; and are published by See-A-Dot Music Publishing, Chestnutoak Press, and the Justice Choir Songbook. Recent commissions include the choral sound installation Lessons of Stone, for the Astoria Choir at the Noguchi Gallery in Long Island City; the feminist collaborative work Visions of Flight, for the Danish National Girls’ Choir and cellist Henrik Dam Thomsen; and the live remote choral project Reunion, which brought together Joyful Noise, Cambridge Common Voices, the Central Illinois Youth Chorus, and cellist Martin Laufhutte across six states as part of her initiative to foster live remote choral singing during the isolation phase of the COVID-19 pandemic.
