Cecilia Livingston

Cecilia Livingston is a Canadian composer of opera and orchestral music. She is composer-in-residence at the Canadian Opera Company, and was composer-in-residence at Glyndebourne Opera.

A profile in Opera Canada headlined Livingston as "a true storyteller" in new opera. Her work has drawn comparisons from reviewers and musicologists to both Missy Mazzoli and Jeanine Tesori, the first two female composers commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera, and to Benjamin Britten. A cover story for La Scena Musicale concluded that "the range of Livingston's achievements is undeniable."

During her graduate studies, Livingston joined Tapestry Opera’s 2013 Composer-Librettist Laboratory (LibLab), composing opera scenes with various librettists, including Morris Panych, Nicolas Billon, and David Yee. Three of these early Livingston opera scenes, two written for Krisztina Szabó, were singled out in a review for The Globe and Mail as exemplary new opera written in “a tradition of creative imagination being brought to bear on the human condition… that Mozart would have recognized instantly.”

That same year, Livingston received her first opera commission, from indie producer Opera 5, for an adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death" with chamber orchestra, soloists, and choir. Livingston’s chamber opera Masque premiered in a three-show run in October 2013, on a triple bill with Debussy and Daniel Pinkham. A review by John Terauds, classical music critic for the Toronto Star, noted the work of “young Toronto composer Cecilia Livingston” as “the highlight of the evening,” describing her opera’s music as “Kurt Weill-meets-Tin Pan Alley” that “bounced and bubbled and slithered along beguilingly,” and particularly praising her writing for bass and baritone, and for the voices in ensemble.

In 2014, Livingston was selected for Bang On a Can’s Summer Music Festival, where she studied with Steve Reich and David Lang, and composed and premiered Troy for percussion quartet and Noyade for orchestra. Livingston would go on to study with Reich again through Soundstreams’ Emerging Composer Workshop. winning a SSHRC Talent Postdoctoral Award and going on to become Postdoctoral Fellow in Music at King’s College London.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, British opera director Tim Albery devised an operatic collaboration between Livingston and Donna McKevitt, about the life and work of Derek Jarman, to be produced by Soundstreams as a film for its digital platforms. Garden of Vanished Pleasures, featuring Mireille Asselin, was a finalist for OPERA America’s inaugural Awards for Digital Excellence in Opera (2022); Soundstreams then mounted a staged production, with Albery again directing. Albery has publicly praised Livingston’s operatic imagination, describing her as more than a composer, but also “a true woman of the theatre.” The following summer, she joined the faculty of the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity’s Opera in the 21st Century program. (Canada's National Arts Centre subsequently commissioned Livingston to create a set of orchestrations of classical art song, which were premiered by the National Arts Centre Orchestra, conducted by Alexander Shelley.) A review in Gramophone by Welsh composer and musicologist Pwyll ap Siôn observed that the most striking moments on D’Angelo’s album belonged to opera composers Livingston and Jeanine Tesori, comparing them as creators of “larger operatic works,” and praising Livingston for her “magical weblike melodies” and the “arresting and strangely alluring” effects of her music.

That same year, the University of Toronto commissioned a new opera from Livingston, to be conducted by Sandra Horst, as part of the celebrations for the 80th anniversary of their Faculty of Music’s Opera Division in 2026. The commission was additionally supported through funding from the university’s Roger D. Moore Distinguished Visitor in Composition, a post previously held by Reich, Krysztof Penderecki, and Ana Sokolovic.

She subsequently received the 2024 Louis Applebaum Composers Award, given that year in recognition of “excellence for a body of work in the field of composition for theatre, music theatre, dance or opera.” The awarding jury concluded that Livingston had already, in barely a decade of professional activity as a composer, “made a profound contribution to contemporary opera in Canada and around the world.”

In opera scholarship

In addition to her work as a composer of opera, Livingston is also active in academic research on opera, particularly 20th and 21st century opera.

Beyond her invited chapter on operatic adaptation in the Cambridge Companion to Composition, she has been published in Tempo, The Opera Quarterly, and the Cambridge Opera Journal, and has presented papers at the International Conference on Music Since 1900 (ICMSN) at the University of Glasgow, the Royal Musical Association (RMA) annual conference at the University of Liverpool, the RMA Music & Philosophy Conference at King’s College London, the International Conference on Music and Minimalism at Cardiff University, the American Musicological Society (AMS) annual conferences in San Antonio and Chicago, and the Modern Language Association (MLA) annual conference in San Francisco.

As a graduate student, Livingston was a member of the Operatics Working Group in the Jackman Humanities Institute at the University of Toronto, along with Dylan Robinson.

From 2017 to 2018, she was a Visiting Research Fellow at King’s College London, supervised by opera scholar Roger Parker.