Erin Heisel

Erin Heisel’s performances have been described as “brave, vivid” (The New York Times) and “clear, flute-like…beautiful” (Daily Hampshire Gazette, MA). In New York City, performances at the Cornelia Street Café with the Composer’s Collaborative series “Serial Underground,” on the “Friends and Enemies of New Music” series with composer David Del Tredici at the piano, at The Tank, The Galapagos Artspace, The Stone, and at the Brooklyn Library, Brooklyn Museum, and BAM in concerts sponsored by the Brooklyn Philharmonic. She has performed with the Winston-Salem Symphony, the Springfield Symphony Orchestra (MA), the Arcadia Players Baroque Orchestra, the Lisa Leizman Dance Company, the Downtown Sinfonietta in White Plains, NY, and with the Orquesta Sinfónica Juvenil in Santa Cruz, Bolivia. Other international performances include a recital at the Theatrum Kuks Baroque Festival in the Czech Republic, concerts at venues around South Africa, and a program of American song at the Official Residence of the American Ambassador in Bratislava, Slovakia. Heisel is the voice of the vampire in Ronen Shai’s animated opera “Todd and the Vampire.”

Also interested in physical theatre and movement improvisation, Heisel has performed and written a variety of experimental theatre pieces. Her experimental theatre piece based on the work of Henry David Thoreau and John Cage, “Let Us Spend One Day As Deliberately As Nature,” premiered in North Carolina and an extended, multimedia version of the piece entitled “One Deliberate Day” was produced as part New York University’s experimental music program IMPACT in Summer, 2015. Her piece “Transformations,” with music by John Cage, premiered at The Tank in New York City; extended versions have been performed at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro and the University of Alaska-Fairbanks. Heisel was also seen as a Rat Captain in the world premiere staging of John Corigliano’s “Pied Piper Fantasy” with the Brooklyn Philharmonic. At New York University, Heisel performed modern dance and sang in “inner voice” in the Master’s Dance Concert and was part of “Mother is Breath,” a physical theatre piece prepared for the Women’s Project of the Ethno-Cultural Theatre Forum.

Heisel holds a Bachelor of Music degree in voice from Butler University, a Master’s in voice from University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and a PhD in Music Performance (Voice) from New York University with research in Johan Huizinga’s theory of play and the work of professional musicians. She has taught at New York University, Adelphi University, the University of Massachusetts, and Bay Path College. An active music researcher and writer, she has presented work celebrating the interdependence of music performance and research at conferences in the US and abroad.