Tamara Cashour

Member since 2006

TAMARA CASHOUR is an award-winning NYC-based composer of vocal and instrumental chamber music, incidental music, sacred organ/choral music and opera/musical-theatre hybrid works. Her works have premiered nationally (USA) and in international venues.

Awards include: five ASCAPlus awards; the 2015 Bronx BRIO award in musical composition for QUEENS SUITE, a 7-movement work for strings/harp (also a featured score at the 2015 International Conference of the International Alliance of Women in Music); and first place, For Women Only Composition Choral Contest, sponsored by the NY Treble Singers for GIRLY HURLY BURLY, her 'choral-theatre burlesque' for SSAA women's voices, 2 violins, hurdy gurdy (or bagpipe) piano, and actress. GIRLY HURLY BURLY will be staged outdoors in Spuyten Duyvil Park, Bronx, NY in October 2019 as part of OperAvant's Environmental Harmonies Series.

Cashour's compositions have been widely heard in New York City at: Dimenna Center for Classical Music, Symphony Space, St. Peters Church @ Citicorp Center, Columbia University's CASA ITALIANA, WINGS Theatre, Theatre Lab, Queens College LeFrak Concert Hall. Cashour's new musical CITY SKETCHES premiered both at 47th St. Theatre in Manhattan and The Golden Fleece Chamber Composers Cabaret Revue. Cashour has also presented her compositions as part of conferences at Brandeis University, Truman State University, and has read academic papers on music topics at St. Louis University and Gettysburg College. She has been invited to read at conferences sponsored by The Working-Class Studies Association and Progressive Connexions Interdisciplinary Conferences.

Cashour's theatrically-infused compositions often undertake a socio-political concern/message via the abstraction of musical language as melded to semiotics and critical theory as drawn from a pool of several disciplines: gender studies/feminist theory, philosophy of technology, class studies, and many others. Cashour is a self-proclaimed interdisciplinarian and engages in continuing research/writing not only in arts fields, but in seemingly unrelated disciplines such as contemporary philosophy and political economy. Cashour was part of the Interdisciplinary Humanities PhD 1 cohort 2016-17 at the Global Center for Advanced Studies and is currently enrolled in continuing education classes at the Institute for Radical Imagination.

Cashour is also a collaborative pianist at The New School College of Performing Arts, Assistant Conductor/Bronx Concert Singers, and Music Director/Organist/Composer in Residence at the Presbyterian Church of New Rochelle. She is also Artistic/Music Director of OperAvant, Inc., based in the Bronx, and the Long-Island based opera company The Footlight Players.

BA, Columbia University, in Music Theory; MA, New York University in Musical Direction and Avant-garde Theatre Studies. Studied two semesters: MFA, Musical Composition, Vermont College of Fine Arts.

Cashour is a 2017-19 HASTAC scholar. She is a published writer on musical topics as well as topics of philosophy and critical theory. A sample of her writings appear at the link below.