Renée Favand-See is a composer and soprano living in Portland, Oregon. Her works explore the music of words, natural and made environments, emotions and spiritual questions. These investigations yield vocal music of all stripes, Musique Concrète-esque electronic pieces, and lyrically driven instrumental music cultivating relationships that unfold in the spaces between voices.
Current projects include a commission for Trio Triumphatrix and Voices of Ascension for their production Astronautica: Voices of Women in Space being premiered in January 2021. Recent projects include: Solitude for soprano Arwen Myers; Ten full moons for Northwest Art Song; Wie der Katz mit der Maus for fEARnoMUSIC; Growing for Portland Piano International; as well as a recording project of her work Only in falling with Resonance Ensemble. Among her commissions are works for Voices of Ascension, Resonance Ensemble, Five Boroughs Music Festival, Lucy Shelton and Eighth Blackbird, Sequitur, PRISM Saxophone Quartet, American Opera Projects, Wet Ink Ensemble, Outer Voices Festival, and cellist Ha-Yang Kim. Other groups who have performed her music include The Julians; Friends of Rain; Electrogals; Del Sol String Quartet; Peabody Trio; and many singers, including Hai-Ting Chinn, Jesse Blumberg, Blythe Gaissert, Hannah Penn, Anna Haagenson, Alissa Rose, Jennifer Aylmer, Kristin Norderval, and William Ferguson.
Renée has written chamber, orchestral, choral and electronic pieces, as well as music for video and dance, including collaborations with Ten Tiny Dances in Portland, TRIP Dance Theatre in Los Angeles, Group Motion in Philadelphia and video artist Christine Sciulli in New York City. Renée has also ventured into theater, with long-time friend and collaborator, Hai-Ting Chinn, with Science Fair, a staged vocal recital produced by HERE Arts Center in New York City.
Her music has been heard at Resonant Bodies Festival, Weill Hall at Carnegie Hall, Symphony Space, Joe's Pub Public, American Opera Projects at South Oxford Space, Opera Index, Outer Voices, and HERE Arts Center in New York City; Agnes Flanagan Chapel, Lincoln Hall and First Presbyterian in Portland; WGBH Radio Boston and Pickman Concert Hall in Cambridge; The Longy School of Music in Paris; New Music New Haven, Kilbourn Concert Series in Rochester; First and Franklin Street Concert Series in Baltimore; and Settlement Music School in Philadelphia.
Renée’s works are featured on Five Borough’s “Five Borough Songbook” on GPR Records; Sequitur's "To Have and to Hold" available on Koch, and on Prism Quartet’s “Dedication” on Innova. This year, her choral work Only in falling will be recorded and released by Resonance Ensemble.
Her honors include a grant from the American Music Center for her oratorio Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes., a Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Bearns Prize from Columbia University.
She holds B.M. and M.M. degrees in composition from the Eastman and Yale Schools of Music, respectively. She studied composition with Joseph Schwantner, Samuel Adler, Warren Benson and David Liptak at Eastman, and then with Mathias Spahlinger at the Hochschule für Musik Freiburg, and with Martin Bresnick, David Lang and Jacob Druckman at the Yale School of Music. Her earliest compositional studies began at age twelve at The Walden School, a summer program for young musicians in Dublin, New Hampshire.
Renée currently teaches music composition and theory at Portland State University and Creative Musicians Retreat in New England.