Dr. Heather Gilligan

Heather Gilligan serves as Chair of the Music Department; oversees the areas of composition, theory, and aural skills; teaches Composition, Music Theory I-IV, Counterpoint, and Analytical Techniques; and is the co-founder and co-director of Currants, the department’s Contemporary Ensemble.

As a composer, she seeks to write music that is edgy and lyrical, both direct and compassionate while exploring the limits of emotion from humor to anguish. She is a member of the Boston Composers Coalition, a group of seven composers dedicated to the creation, performance, education, and dissemination of new American music.

Her recent successes include the release of her CD, Living in Light, on the Albany Records label this past spring; premieres of her choral, wind band, and orchestral music at the New York Choral Festival in Carnegie Hall and the Washington D.C. International Music Festival at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts; and publication of her award-winning work for solo flute in the SCI Journal of Music Scores. Jonathan Blumhofer (The Arts Fuse) described her CD as “a new album that capably demonstrates that the art song is not only alive and well but thriving in the early decades of the 21st century.”

Dr. Gilligan served as Accompanist and Composer-in-Residence for the Chamber Singers of Keene from 2010-2014 and she was named the NHMEA Composer of the Year in 2010. More recently, she has written works for American Modern Ensemble, the East Winds Quintet, soprano Margot Rood, the Arneis String Quartet, the Chamber Singers of Keene, Anthology vocal quartet, and Ensemble 451.

Dr. Gilligan received her DMA in Composition from Boston University, where she won the Malloy Miller Prize in Composition, a Dean’s Scholarship, and a Department Honor Award. At BU she studied composition with Richard Cornell, Martin Amlin, and Ketty Nez. She earned her MM in Composition from the Longy School of Music, where she studied composition and piano.

She completed, with distinction, a course at La Schola Cantorum in Paris, in a program sponsored by the European American Musical Alliance. She also holds a Bachelor’s degree in Chemistry from Lehigh University.