Elizabeth Vercoe (born 23 April 1941) is an American musician, music educator and composer.
Born in Washington, D.C., Elizabeth Vercoe grew up in a musical family and studied piano and violin while attending the National Cathedral School. From 1958 to 1962, she studied music theory at Wellesley College where she was awarded the Hubert Weldon Lamb Prize in Composition. Following college, Vercoe began graduate school at the University of Michigan where she pursued a Masters of Music degree in composition, studying under George Wilson, Ross Lee Finney and Leslie Bassett. In 1974, Vercoe entered the doctoral program in music composition at Boston University where she was mentored by composer Gardner Read and was awarded First Prize in Music Theory and Composition and elected to Pi Kappa Lambda, the national music honor society.
Her teaching posts have included a position teaching music theory on the faculty at Westminster Choir College in Princeton, New Jersey, a year at Framingham State College in Massachusetts, and her current job since 1997 as an adjunct professor at Regis College.[1]
Vercoe has won a number of national and international composition competitions and received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Meet the Composer, and the Massachusetts Arts Council. She has also received fellowships from the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris from 1983 to 1985 for three separate residencies in France, and has been a Fellow at the MacDowell Colony, the Charles Ives Center for American Music, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Italy. In 2003 Elizabeth Vercoe was awarded the Acuff Chair of Excellence at Austin Peay State University for a semester residency in which she gave public lectures, coached performances of her music, and was commissioned to write new work.
Notable performances include those by the Memphis Chamber Orchestra, the Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra, the Berkshire Symphony Orchestra, the Women's Philharmonic, the Aeolian Chamber Players, the New York Virtuoso Singers, Alea III, and the Great Noise Ensemble, and at such venues as the Amalfi Coast Festival, the Goethe Institute in Bangkok, the Marblehead Festival, the Svenska Mandolinfestivalen, Carnegie Recital Hall, the Salle Cortot, IRCAM, the Piccolo Spoleto Festival, Abraham Goodman House and Merkin Hall.
[2] Her recorded music is issued on the Owl, Capstone, Leonarda and Centaur labels, and she is published by Arsis Press and Plucked String Editions.[3]
Selected works include: