Super excited to announce new guest, Maria Corley, to The Story!

Maria Thompson Corley (BM, University of Alberta; MM, DMA, The Juilliard School) was born in Jamaica and raised in Canada. She has performed internationally, as both as a solo and collaborative artist, at venues including the Smithsonian Museum of African American History, Epidaurus Festival, Liszt Academy, Carnegie Recital Hall, and Aaron Davis Hall. Among her collaborators are Metropolitan Opera soprano Priscilla Baskerville, Juno Award-winning clarinetist James Campbell, Grammy-winning clarinetist Doris Hall-Gulati, Grammy-nominated baritone Randall Scarlata, renowned countertenor Darryl Taylor, and members of the New York Philharmonic and Philadelphia Orchestras. Her engagements as a soloist with orchestra include the Tallahassee Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Gunther Schuller. She and cellist Sara Male formed Duo Chiaroscuro in 2011; among their passions is performing concerts for people whose special needs prevent strict observance of concert protocols. Dr. Corley has recorded CD's for Naxos, Albany, MSR Classical, Navona, and independent labels. Excerpts from her discs have been featured on radio and digital platforms, nationally and internationally. Her recordings of selections from Valerie Capers’ Portraits in Jazz were included in the HBO special, “Kebreeya’s Salad Days,” her recording of Leslie Adams’s “Etude in C Sharp Minor” was included in award-winning director Timothy Greenfield-Sanders’s documentary, Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am, and her performance of “Mother’s Sacrifice” by L. Viola Kinney was selected for ABC’s Women of the Movement: Mamie Till.

A sought-after composer and arranger, her solo piano piece, “Lucid Dreaming,” was a semi-finalist in the 2021 international Fidelio competition, and her piece for trumpet and piano, “Helicity,” was the winner of the 2021 AMSONIA international competition’s instrumental division. That same year, she was a co-recipient, with librettist Diana Solomon-Glover, of an Opera America IDEA grant. Her music has been commissioned, performed and/or recorded by several universities, Juventas New Music Ensemble, Canadian Art Song Project, Renaissance Winds, tubist Daniel Rowland, countertenor Darryl Taylor, mezzo-soprano Raehann Bryce-Davis, sopranos Nadine Benjamin, Sequina Dubose, Louise Toppin and Randye Jones, among others. She is published by Walton, North Star, Classical Vocal Reprints, and NoteNova. Her song cycle Grasping Water was added to the curricula at University of Michigan (Ann Arbor), Jackdaws Music Education Trust in the U.K., and University of California (Irvine). Her debut mini-opera, The Sky Where You Are, with a libretto by Jenny O’Connell, was part of the award-winning Decameron Opera Coalition’s Tales from a Safe Distance. Her second mini-opera, The Place, with a libretto by Sandra Oyinloye, was written for DOC’s subsequent production, Heroes. She is the librettist and composer of The Fox and the Cookie, a children’s opera about The Golden Rule that world-premiered in 2023 at University of Texas El Paso.

You can find Maria and her projects here:

Website: https://mariacorley.com/

Find The Story Podcast here: coryrosenproductions.com/podcasts

The Story Behind A Professional, Academic Composer EP 161 Maria Corley