Ellen Mandel, composer, has written music for over sixty plays at theaters in New York City including the Mint, Jean Cocteau Rep (Resident Composer), Pearl, Phoenix Theatre Ensemble, and Riverside Shakespeare, and at regional theaters including the Asolo (FL), Antaeus (LA—Scenie Award), Arkansas Rep, Tennessee Rep, Pendragon, and Peterborough Players. She has composed scores for five indie films, and for dance and cabaret, as well as on the spot for improv comedy. Ellen has also written many songs to poems and released five CDs: a wind has blown the rain away (E.E. Cummings songs), the first of all my dreams (E.E. Cummings, Seamus Heaney, and other songs), Every Play’s an Opera (theatre music), There Was a World (Heaney and Glyn Maxwell texts), and The Cat and the Moon, (settings of Heaney, Yeats, Thomas Hardy, Haiku by Daniel Neer). She has written music and lyrics for seven musical comedies for children. Dizzy Gillespie called her a “wonderful musician.”
Ellen’s art songs have been performed in concert at venues including the Tribeca New Music Festival, St Mark’s Church on the Bowery, Klavierhaus, and the Century Center, all in New York City, the Sirena Poetry Festival in Pennsylvania, the In-Series in Washington DC, the Florio Street Concerts in California, the Peterborough Players in New Hampshire, the New Gallery Concert Series in Boston, in Ireland at the Kilkenny Arts Festival and in England and Scotland.
Ellen Mandel
| To listen to Ellen’s music and learn more about her visit www.ellenmandel.com. Ellen is married to author and fellow musician Michael Lydon’65. |