BIO / UPCOMING & RECENT PERFORMANCES / PRESS / MORE
Biography
“At that moment in my life I began to think and to write music. Oh yes.
Wretched idea! . . . very wretched idea!”
Ashi Day is a composer and educator whose vocally-driven music explores unconventional intersections between music and theater; using the voice as a compositional tool; strategic use of humor and absurdity; and expanding the canon to embrace and reflect the experiences of performers and audiences, especially women and girls, with an emphasis on compassion and kindness. She also writes a lot of songs about animals.
Ashi received a Discovery Grant for Women Composers from Opera America to support the development of Waking the Witch. a 75-minute immersive chamber opera in which the audience assumes the role as a 16th-Century accused witch being interrogated by a Witchfinder (countertenor or mezzo-soprano/contralto). Using a text drawn from the words of historical witch hunters as well as modern day leaders and movements with eerily similar rhetoric, the opera explores ever-repeating human vulnerability to absurd beliefs and the danger of mixing authority and religion with black-and-white thinking and conspiracy theories. Written for solo voice and Pierrot+ ensemble (fl., cl., vln., vlc., pno., and perc.), the treble instruments join the drama as animal familiars, possibly real, possibly hallucinatory shapeshifting demons who do the devil’s work.
Ashi’s additional short chamber operas all explore, in some way, who gets to move freely through the world and who does not. For Whom the Dog Tolls, written for soprano Charlotte Stewart-Juby, is a 10-minute piece for soprano, piano, duck call, and whistle, that shows a day-in-the-life of a Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever, a unique breed of Canadian hunting dog with the ability to lure ducks to their demise. The opera deliberately creates a role for soprano that is victorious and joyful at every moment, and has been performed by The Fresh Squeezed Opera Company and Renegade Opera as well as in multiple concert performances. The Green Child, commissioned by clarinet and soprano duo Whistling Hens, tells the story of two girls rescuing each other from both physical and existential danger. Both the singer and the instrumentalist portray characters in the 15-minute “play” based on the French fairytale “The Green She-Devil” and the 12th-Century English legend of the green children of Woolpit. The piece was included in Hartford Opera Theater’s Folxtales in addition to multiple concert and festival performances by the Hens.
Ashi’s operas, art songs, and choral pieces have also been performed by Opera from Scratch, Whistling Hens, StageFree, Metropolitan Master Chorale of Los Angeles, Artifice, Ensemble Lyrae, American University Chorus, Wisconsin State University Concert Choir, College of the Holy Cross Choir, University of Wisconsin-River Falls Chamber Choir, the University of Stavanger, and more. She has won calls for scores from Calliope’s Call and Juventas New Music Ensemble with her art song “Open Your Mouth,” a simple setting of Proverbs 31:8-9 that showcases the similarities between biblical and social justice language. She has also been a festival composer at Choral Arts Initiative’s PREMIERE|Project Festival, Denison TUTTI, New Music on the Bayou, NEO Voice Festival, Women Composers Festival of Hartford, Music by Women, University of North Georgia’s Research on Contemporary Composition Festival, District New Music Coalition’s New Music DC, and more. Ashi won prizes in the Sewanee Church Conference’s FYFE Choral Composition Competition for the sacred anthem “Even So, Lord, Quickly Come” and the New York Treble Singers Composition Competition for “The Dove Pursues the Griffin.” She has been commissioned by Whistling Hens, PERI Trio, Connecticut Yankee Chorale, Anthology vocal quartet, Cantate Chamber Singers, and flutist Megan Shanley Alger, as well as by individual singers and church choirs.
In devised theater, she collaborated with artists of various disciplines to co-create Narrative the Build We for Cultural DC’s Source Festival and Being Moss as part of I Thought the Earth Remembered Me with banished? productions for the Capital Fringe Festival.
Ashi has been named a DC Arts and Humanities Fellow for 2021 and 2023 alongside artists of all mediums “whose artistic excellence significantly contributes to the District of Columbia as a world class cultural capital.”
Ashi earned a B.M. and M.M. in Composition respectively from Bucknell University and Westminster Choir College. Composition teachers include William Duckworth, Jackson Hill, Stefan Young, and Joel Phillips. Equally dedicated to education, Ashi spent five years teaching elementary music and reading in south Florida, simultaneously studying improv theater and classical voice. She later earned her Ed.M. in Arts in Education from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where she was named an Urban Scholars Fellow for her work in arts education. She now works in arts education administration, creating opportunities for people of all ages to experience, explore, learn through, and train in music and opera. As a soprano, she is a professional church musician and a member of DC’s new composer/conductor collaborative ensemble, Artifice. Ashi is an excellent partner for singing rounds and hopes you’ll ask. She resides in Washington, DC, with her husband and her dog/muse.
Pronunciation
Upcoming/Recent Performances
Maryland Opera Studio New Works Reading
The Fishwife (premiere)
February 14, 2025, The Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center, College Park, MD
PERI Trio: Inspiring Women
Tremble (premiere)
November 23, 2024, St. John’s Episcopal Church, McLean, VA
Cappella Clausura: Music to Lighten the Darkness
The Evening Darkens Over
November 16, 2024, Grace Church, Newton, MA
November 17, 2024, Emmanuel Church, Boston, MA
Little City Concerts: Waking the Witch
Waking the Witch
October 19, 2024, The Falls Church Episcopal, Falls Church, VA
Chants Libres with Paramirabo: Oper’Actuel Works in Progress 2024
Waking the Witch (excerpts)
August 24 & 25, 2024, Espace Bleu, Édifice Wilder, Montreal, QC
KC VITAs: Now That’s What I Call VITAs
Boundless
August 2 and 4, 2024, Community Christian Church, Kansas City, MO
LA Arts: Jenna Guiggey and Scott Wheatley: A Recital of Art Song
Words and Images of Edvard Munch
December 2, 2023, LA Arts, Lewiston, ME
Renegade Opera: She Loves You Back: Climate Dramas
For Whom the Dog Tolls
Presented with The Letter (Shruthi Rajasekar), Frauenliebe und Leben (Robert Schumann), and No One Saves the Earth from Us But Us and Sonnet at the Edge of the Reef (Lisa Neher)
November 18-19, 2023, Historic Alberta House, Portland, OR
Choral Arts Initiative: PREMIERE|Project Festival
To help the Crampe (premiere)
June 30, 2023, Concordia University Irvine, Irvine, CA
KC VITAs: 2023 Spring Series
Nothing New Under the Sun
May 19 and 21, 2023, Prairie Village, KS
Previous Performances
Press
WAKING THE WITCH
OperaWire: Q&A: Ashi Day on "‘Waking the Witch’ & Contemporary Opera
Bucknell Magazine: Making Music Together: Interview with Ashi Day & Lee Cromwell
Opera America Press Release: 2022 Opera Grants for Women Composers: Discovery Grants
FOR WHOM THE DOG TOLLS
Oregon ArtsWatch: A kind of shelter: Renegade Opera’s ‘American Patriots’ and ‘She Loves You Back’
“Ashi Day’s For Whom the Dog Tolls opened the show in a wild, humorous manner. Vocalist Emily Evelyn Way was really having fun with the choreography, running around barefoot with evocative facial expressions and hand puppetry. The piece places the vocalist into the emotions and behaviors of a dog (a Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever in particular): their extremities of joy and sadness, with wide eyes and raised ears, turning into confusion at humanity’s more esoteric forms of communication. But despite this joy, the dog remains subservient to its human companion, begging for attention and admiration.”
Reacting to the Landscape
(Album by Whistling Hens)
International Association of Women in Music Journal vol. 29, no. 2
“The clarinet’s thematic material makes it clear that its character is hopelessly trying to convince the soprano to stay, despite her playfully frivolous demeanor. An improvised outburst by the clarinet emphasizes the disappointment and heartache felt by its character. Though short, the whimsical nature of the piece was the perfect introduction to the album.”
“Wrought with a variety of unique sounds, extended techniques, and other aural effects, the story is brought to life in an impressively convincing and delightful way. Both Piazza-Pick and Groom executed their roles so effectively, I often wondered if there were more than two performers.”
International Clarinet Association Journal (The Clarinet vol. 50, no. 4)
“Ashi Day’s work “Thursday” welcomes the listener with Groom’s rich, fluid, and colorful tone and skilled technical ability. The duo establishes their virtuosity with the use of color as a primary component in their performance, and Groom’s sensitivity to the entry of the voice. She executes extended techniques... with clarity and fluidity, effortlessly integrat- ing them into the music...This is a must-have album, not just for the wonderful playing, but because the choices of repertoire were intentional and put to- gether in a masterful way. ”
Narrative the Build We, The Source Festival
“...a gentle and even jaunty reminder of how we rush to fill in storytelling blanks...”
I Thought the Earth Remembered Me, banished? productions, Capital Fringe Festival
“...you’ll leave I Thought the Earth Remembered Me with a sense of childlike wonder that you may not have felt since you graduated from the third grade and a peace you may never have felt during waking hours...”
"The Dove Pursues the Griffin", Cantilena, a women's chorale
“...refreshingly vivid, guttural experience... dramatically successful...”
Additional Media
Opera America’s Teens Tackle Opera Podcast: Special Edition: Interview with Composer Ashi Day
District New Music Coalition Podcast Episode 4: Ashi Day; William Kenlon and Meghan Shanley Alger, hosts
Whistling Hens Living Composer Spotlight: Diana Rosenblum & Ashi Day
0:00 Interview with Diana Rosenblum; 25:35 “Winter Rain” (Rosenblum); 29:15 Interview with Ashi Day; 44:24 “The Green Child” (Day); 59:30 Conversation with Whistling Hens, Diana Rosenblum, and Ashi Day
StageFree Podcast: Episode 8—Concert 2.4: Bytes and Brushes