New York City music-maker Kitty Brazelton loves to do everything: sing, play in bands, improvise, compose operas, symphonies, music for chamber, church and choir, teach, write, translate ancient texts, think in four languages, study, watch, listen, and learn as much as she can about the world around her. Music is her passion since eighteen when she joined the campus acid rock band, discovered medieval plainchant, radical free jazz improvisation and the ascetic serialism of the mid-20th-c. classical “uptown” all at once.

“Brazelton is a totalist composer, part of a generation that believes that there's more than one way to compose and that all musical genres are available for use, from high modernism to downtown funk. She isn't interested in cheap irony or vain attempts at hipness, though; she's stylistically inclusive because she simply wants to make interesting and original sounds.” —Danny Felsenfeld, Time Out New York

Dancer, sculptor, illustrator, teen poet, rock plunges twenty-something Kitty into the punk underground of CBGBs, then on to four national tours, Billboard remarking on her “natural stage presence”, New York Times “the richness of her soprano” and The New Yorker mentioning her semi-classical-fused-with-folk band Musica Orbis in the same paragraph as the band Talking Heads.

Evolving into a “dynamo on stage” (New York Times), thirty-something Brazelton goes metal, fronting and songwriting for rock bands V and Hide the Babies. Together they pursue the American rock dream, trying to get "signed", building a following in nightclubs in Philadelphia and New York, making videos but the response is peripatetic. Spiritually, emotionally and mentally spent, Brazelton begins to attend grad school during the day, writing serialist chamber music. Mentor Jack Beeson challenges her to resolve this double life.

Seeking deeper and truer harmony of expression, Kitty returns to the totalism of her youth, sharpening its edge with twenty years of stage experience. Now forty-something and a new mother, she founds Dadadah, a nine-piece comprov rockestra with jazz horns and classical harp & cello, whose 1999 CD Love Not Love Lust Not Lust is called “brilliant” (New York Times) and “impressive” (Rolling Stone).

During this decade—the ’90s—Brazelton explodes with performance activity, curating the seminal totalist Real Music Series on Sundays at CBGBs for “composers, musicmakers, wordsmiths & mavericks” juxtaposing these performers in brief cameos on three stages surrounded by inflatable sculpture. In a similar spirit of rich contrast, she curates the Women's Avant Fest in Chicago in 1997.

She founds American chamber sextet Bog Life in 1991, co-founds cyber-punk What Is It Like to Be a Bat? in 1995, whose 2003 CD on John Zorn's Tzadik draws comments such as “brilliant and dangerous” (All Music Guide) and “pending Armageddon” (Boston Herald). In 1996 she collaborates with three other downtown women composers to become the Hildegurls who reinterpret medieval abbess-composer Hildegard von Bingen at Lincoln Center Festival ’98.

Still, Kitty continues to see herself as working within the classical tradition, infusing American dialects into deep, complex and passionate structures. She composes Sleeping Out of Doors, a semi-concerto for piano and orchestra premiered by Kristjan Järvi and Absolute Ensemble at Merkin Hall in 1998.

American Opera Projects commissions 4th-of-July Fireworks in 1999, words by Billy Aronson (Rent, Comedy Channel), music by Kitty Brazelton, which premieres in Brooklyn's Fort Greene Park in 2002 outdoors beneath a Civil War monument with a small multi-genre orchestra.

A Doctor of Musical Arts in Composition (Columbia University ’94), her chamber music is heard in innovative works for Manhattan Brass Quintet and California EAR Unit on her 2002 release Chamber Music for the Inner Ear (CRI Emergency/New World, with support from the Copland Recording Fund) to which Gramophone UK responded:

“Few composers are as uninhibited in saying exactly what they want to say…a trip you’re not likely to forget.”

Through it all, Kitty maintains a commitment to serve the cause of universal harmony by uniting musical languages.

Kitty Brazelton is a professor at Bennington College in Vermont and lives in New York City’s East Village where her daughter attends high school.

Brazelton's current
projects include:

• Twin Cities choir VocalEssence and director Philip Brunelle commission and premiere Brazelton's O Joy!, “a commercial yet very meaningful setting of Psalm 77” (Minneapolis Star-Tribune) at their 40th birthday celebration hosted by Garrison Keillor, Orchestra Hall, September 2008. The concert is broadcast later on National Public Radio.
• Kitty's setting of George Plimpton's posthumous libretto Animal Tales, commissioned by the Family Opera Initiative in 2004 with development partners Atlantic Center for the Arts, Montclair State University and the Jaffe Family Foundation, premieres in November 2008 concert readings in New York City to rave response.
• Innova Recordings releases Brazelton's ecclesiastes: a modern oratorio for male vocal quartet, cello, extended drum kit, concert bass drum, hammered dulcimer, bells, “found” soundtracks & drones, with funding from the New York State Music Fund. Brazelton also sings. Texts are from the Book of Ecclesiastes, re-translated from the Hebrew and Latin by Brazelton.
• In spring 2008 while on sabbatical from her post at Bennington College, Brazelton returns to school at the City College of New York to study post-doctorally with composer David Del Tredici setting a cycle of orchestral songs from civil-war-era poetry and letters by abolitionist and slave-owning ancestors.
• (Kitty is interested in writing and teaching how America's musical history can reflect and heal our past, and perhaps our present. To that end, she attends the Center for Black Music Research Conference 2008 in Chicago.)