Karen Siegel

Composer Karen Siegel creates innovative, engaging, and meaningful choral and vocal works. Hailed as “colorful and at times groovy” (WQXR.org), her works are frequently performed by the New York City-based ensemble C4: the Choral Composer/Conductor Collective, which she co-founded in 2005. 

Recent commissions include the choral sound installation “Lessons of Stone,” for the Astoria Choir at the Noguchi Gallery in Long Island City; and the feminist collaborative work Vision of Flight for the Danish National Girls’ Choir and cellist Henrik Dam Thomsen. During the isolation phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, Siegel composed commissions for live remote choral singing and led workshops in online singing. That initiative included Here I Am, premiered by C4 in the first livestream remote choral concert of the social distancing age; as well as the live remote choral project Reunion, which brought together Joyful Noise, Cambridge Common Voices, the Central Illinois Youth Chorus, and cellist Martin Laufhutte. The Hat: Arendt Meets Heidegger, Siegel’s one-act opera with a libretto by Zsuzsanna Ardó, was premiered by Chicago’s Thompson Street Opera Company in 2019. 

Siegel’s works are featured on albums by The Crossing (coming Fall 2024), Harmonium Choral Society, the Choir of Trinity College Melbourne, Tonality, and C4; are published by See-A-Dot Music Publishing and Chestnut Oak Press; are distributed under the Creative Commons license in the Justice Choir Songbook; and are published in The Singing Book, Fourth Edition (Rowman & Littlefield, 2024). 

Siegel is also an accomplished choral conductor. She has served as one of the conductors of C4 for 19 years, and she founded and directed the Beloved Community Charter School High School Chorus in Jersey City in the spring of 2023. Siegel received a Ph.D. in Composition from the CUNY Graduate Center, where she studied with Tania León; and she holds degrees from Yale (B.A. in Psychology) and NYU Steinhardt (M.M. in Composition), where she studied with Marc-Antonio Consoli. She has been on the faculty at Drew University and the City College of New York. Siegel lives in Hoboken NJ with her husband and two sons.