Dr. Dominick DiOrio
Title:
Director of Choral Activities, Associate Professor of Music
Education:
M.M.A. Choral Conducting, Yale University, 2009
M.M. Choral Conducting, Yale University, 2008
Bachelor of Music in Composition, Ithaca College School of Music 2006
Office: H101-C
E-mail: Dominick.DiOrio@LoneStar.edu
Phone: 936.273.7270
Professional:
With expertise as both a conductor and composer, Dominick DiOrio is one of the leading choral musicians of his generation. Since 2009, he has been Director of Choral Activities and Associate Professor of Music at Lone Star College-Montgomery. Responsible for the entire choral-vocal area, Dominick tripled the enrollment of the Concert Choir and Chamber Singers in three years, increased the number of private voice faculty from one to three, and organized and conducted the College’s first ever opera gala and silent auction. He received the Student Star Award in Spring 2011 for excellence in teaching. Before moving to Texas in 2009, Dominick was Director of the University Church Choir and the Divinity School Chapel Choir at Yale, and was assistant conductor with the Ithaca Children’s Choir.
Further afield, Dominick has guest conducted some of the finest ensembles active today, including the Young People’s Chorus of NYC, the American Bach Soloists, the International Orange Chorale of San Francisco, the Academy Chamber Choir of Uppsala, Allmänna Sången, and the Houston Chamber Choir, with whom he sings professionally. He has prepared choruses for performance under some of the world’s leading conductors including Valery Gergiev, Nicholas McGegan, William Boughton, Jon Washburn, Shinik Hahm, Simon Carrington, and Helmuth Rilling. He made his Carnegie Hall conducting debut as an invited fellow of the Carnegie Hall Choral Institute in February 2012.
In October 2009, Dominick was one of only two North American conductors invited to Sweden to compete for the Eric Ericson Award, the top international competition for young choral conductors. He was also a finalist in the 2005 American Choral Directors Association (ACDA) Undergraduate Conducting Awards in Los Angeles. He has three times been invited to participate in master classes hosted by Chorus America, and has also worked with Ragnar Bohlin, Grant Gershon, Paul Hillier, Stephen Layton, Francisco Núñez, Helmuth Rilling, Kathy Saltzman-Romey, and Robert Sund, among others. A fierce advocate of new music, Dominick has premiered works by Dewey Fleszar, Tawnie Olson, and Zachary Wadsworth, as well as his own compositions.
Called “a forward-thinking young composer filled with new ideas, ready to tackle anything”, Dominick was recently named "Best Composer 2011" by HoustonPress. Klytemnestra, his new opera with Divergence Vocal Theater, has been called "dark, engrossing" (Edward Albee), "deeply psychological" (Sequenza21), and "spiky... an amalgam of contemporary opera sounds" (HoustonPress). He has received profiles in all of the major Houston press outlets including the Houston Chronicle, Arts+Culture, CultureMap, HoustonPress, and OutSmart, and he has twice been the featured composer on Houston Public Radio’s noon-time arts program, The Front Row.
Dominick has been awarded prizes in composition from ASCAP and ACDA, as well as from the International Orange Chorale of San Francisco, the Young New Yorker’s Chorus, and the Cantate Chamber Singers. He has received recent commissions for new music from Divergence Vocal Theater, Houston Chamber Choir, and the University of Houston Honors College (Houston); the University Church at Yale and the Yale Institute of Sacred Music (New Haven); Juventas New Music Ensemble (Boston); Commonwealth Youth Choirs (Philadelphia); and the Cornell Chorale (Ithaca). His music has been performed in venues as diverse as the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Rothko Chapel, the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts, and Boston’s Old South Church. His work is published with Alliance, Lorenz, and Oxford.
Dominick earned the Doctor of Musical Arts degree in conducting from the Yale School of Music, studying with Marguerite Brooks, Simon Carrington and Jeffrey Douma. His thesis focuses on pitch procedure in Krzysztof Penderecki’s St. Luke Passion. This research was presented at the 2010 SW ACDA Regional Convention in Denver, and is soon to be published in The Choral Scholar. He also earned both the MMA and MM degrees in conducting from Yale and a Bachelor of Music degree in composition from Ithaca College, where he studied with Gregory Woodward, Dana Wilson, and Janet Galván. He currently resides in Houston, TX.
