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Susan
Borwick
Composer,
musicologist, music theorist, teacher, and ordained minister
Susan Borwick was born in Dallas, TX in 1946. She began composing
as a child, and published her first composition at the age
of fourteen. She graduated from Baylor University with magna
cum laude degrees in music theory and composition, studying
composition with Richard Willis, and in vocal music education,
and then received the Ph.D. in musicology from the University
of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she studied composition
with Roger Hannay. Her dissertation on the music for the stage
collaborations of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht propelled her
toward a lifelong interest in the collaborative creative process.
Dr. Borwick’s early articles focused on Weill and his
widow, a creative artist in her own right, Lotte Lenya.
In her initial faculty appointment at the Baylor University School of Music
(1972-1977), Dr. Borwick continued to compose and arrange for choir and solo
piano, idioms she continues to prefer. She became known at that time for her
piano arrangements of familiar hymns in the Baptist tradition. In 1977, Dr.
Borwick joined the theory and musicology faculties of the Eastman School of
Music, the University of Rochester, where she taught until 1982, when she became
chair of the music department at Wake Forest University. At Wake Forest, she
now is Professor of Music and a member of the Associated Faculty of the Wake
Forest University Divinity School. While she has served three terms as music
chair, one as director of women’s studies, and a year as president of
the University Senate at Wake Forest, her first love remains teaching and collaborating
with students.
Dr. Borwick has guest lectured in Europe, Asia, and North America on spirituality
and the arts, twentieth- and twenty-first-century music, women and music, women
and violence, and theory pedagogy. Articles by her are widely published—for
example, in Opera Quarterly, Music Library Association Notes, Journal of
Thought, Journal of Musicological Research, National Women’s Studies
Association Journal, or the International Alliance of Women in Music
Journal. She helped found the NWSA Contemporary Curriculum Transformation
Project: Multiplicities of Identities and has served two terms on the NWSA
Program Administration & Development Council. She also has served as chair
of the Committee on the Status of Women of the American Musicological Society
and as president of the North Carolina Association of Music Schools.
Divorce and a bout with cancer prompted Dr. Borwick to reinvigorate her call
to composition. During the past dozen years, she has composed prolifically
as she has sought to reinterpret past sacred traditions in spiritually vital
and inclusive ways. She finds inspiration in her faith community, Knollwood
Baptist Church, Winston-Salem, NC, where she is Composer-in-Residence, and
in her son John Borwick and daughter-in-law Lauren Pressley.
Choral
music by Susan Borwick
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