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conductor, composer, percussionist
Biography
Cayenna Ponchione was born and raised in Fairbanks, Alaska, the 'golden heart' of the Alaska interior. In her pursuit of graduate studies in orchestral conducting, she moved to the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York where she completed master's degrees in instrumental conducting and percussion performance at Ithaca College, winning the concerto competition and later serving as the sabbatical replacement for Gordon Stout. Encouraged by the beautiful environment, she welcomed the opportunity to remain in the area to lead two of the region's community orchestras, the Binghamton Community Orchestra and the Ithaca Community Orchestra, and to conduct the annual GrassRoots Festival Chamber Orchestra. Currently at the University of Oxford, Cayenna is pursuing postgraduate studies in musicology, focusing on understanding creativity in orchestral practice and amateur orchestral participation. In addition to maintaining her work with the GrassRoots Festival Chamber Orchestra, she conducts both the Oxford University String Orchestra and the Merton College Fidelio Orchestra.
Cayenna staunchly believes in maintaining the relevancy of orchestral performances and does so by collaborating with other arts and non-arts organizations, commissioning new works and engaging in thematic programming. Her current project, Water-culture: women’s work(s) is an international project aimed at raising water-crisis awareness by connecting women artists to global audiences through artistic collaborations. Premieres of compositions by UK based composers Kate Whitley and Rachel Lockwood based on the poetry of Tompkins County Poet Laureate and water awareness activist, Gail Holst-Warhaft, will be performed by the GrassRoots Festival Chamber Orchestra in Trumansburg on July 22nd, 2012.
Past concert projects have paired local composers and solo artists with a range of organizations including, the Ithaca High School English Department, the Binghamton University Geology Department, and the Binghamton High School Steel Drum Band. The Ithaca Community Orchestra’s concert the “Sound of Words” celebrated the intersection of poetry and music, with new compositions by Tom Schneller and Zachary Wadsworth based on local poets’ works in partnership with the Ithaca Community Chorus, while the Binghamton Community Orchestra concert “Waves of Destruction” memorialized the 2004 Sumatra earthquake with a scientific explanation of the phenomena followed by the premiere of Tim Rolls’ orchestral composition 9.3, an aural description of the natural disaster. In 2009, a collaboration with Buffalo based narrator and author Raya Lee Then, the Broome and Tompkins County Public Libraries and the Tompkins County Family Reading Partnership earned her the Sorel Medallion in Conducting from the Claudette Sorel Foundation.
Through her work The Creation, for percussion ensemble, which won the 2003 Percussive Arts Society Composition Contest, Cayenna has received international recognition as a composer. The Creation, in addition to her other works for percussion has been performed by numerous percussion ensembles throughout the United States and in Central and South America, including the Boston Conservatory, San Francisco Conservatory, and the Eastman Conservatory. Her most recent compositions, Catch… for cello and marimba, Rumble-Stiltskins for marimba duet, and Thanking the Waters for marimba, flute and Taiko drum ensemble, received their premieres at Cornell University and the University of Connecticut this past spring. She is currently working on commissions from the University of Tennessee-Martin percussion department for the opening of UTM’s new music building in 2012, and for the Caixa Trio. Her compositions have been recorded by the University of South Florida percussion ensemble and Brazilian marimbist, Gilmar Goulart and are available through Steve Weiss Music along with her scores published by Connecticut Hill Music Publishers.
Cayenna’s primary conducting teachers have included Neil Thompson (London and Paris), Jeff Grogan, Grant Cooper, Madeline Schatz and Janet Galvan, and additional workshop studies with John Farrer, Mark Scatterday, Donald Hunsberger, Michael Haithcock, Michael Votta, Kate Tamarkin and Donald Portnoy. She has studied percussion with Gordon Stout, Nancy Zeltsman, Jack van Geem, Scott Deal and Douglas Wolf, and composition with Dana Wilson and Gordon Stout.
Cayenna serves on the board of directors for the Zeltsman Marimba Festival and the ZMF New Music Project, sponsor of the creation and publication of Intermediate Masterworks for Marimba in 2 volumes, addressing the need for repertoire in this area.