Karen Tarlow

Karen Anne Tarlow (born September 19, 1947) is an American composer and music educator who has composed multi-media pieces and many choral works based on Hebrew texts.

Tarlow was born in Brookline, Massachusetts. She received a BM and MM from the University of Massachusetts, and a DMA from Boston University. She received a Howard Lebow Memorial Scholarship in 1972 and studied in Germany at the University of Freiburg. In 1978 she won first prize in the Boston University Composition Competition. Her teachers included Philip Bezanson, Wolfgang Fortner, Charles Fussell, Malcolm Peyton, Gardner Read, Robert Stern, Frederick Tillis and David del Tredici.

Tarlow married John Montanari in 1985. She is a retired assistant professor of music theory from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She belongs to the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP), and has received commissions from Da Camera Singers, the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art, the Hampshire Young People's Chorus, and the Picture Book Theatre. Her music is published by ECS Publishing Group, New Valley Press, Zenana (violin and piano) Concerto for Orchestra Emperor and the Nightingale Fields of Sorrow (women's chorus, flute, harp or piano) Lowest Trees Have Tops (two voice and chamber ensemble) Renascence (soprano, clarinet and piano) Salvacion de la Primavera (women's chorus) "Shalom Rav" (Grant Lasting Peace; voice and piano) "Two Songs" (voice and piano) "Ush'mor Tseiteinu" (Guard Our Going Out; voice and piano) Yihyu I'ratzon (Let the Words of My Mouth; two voices and piano) "Yism'chu" (Let the Heavens be Glad; voice and piano)