Photo by Bobby Carnevale
Photo by Cameron Cuchelain
Photo by Cameron Cuchelain
With my dear buds and collaborators, Jeff Dolven, and David Scher (not pictured, because taking the picture).
SHORT BIO:
Majel Connery is a composer, performer, and educator known for crafting epic, immersive musical experiences that invite audiences to step inside the mind of nature. Blending electronic processing with raw vocal power, her music is both playful and profound—equal parts emotional excavation and sonic adventure. Her song cycle Elderflora, a collaboration with photographer Noah Kalina, premiered at Seattle Symphony and has since toured to major venues including The Exploratorium. Her choral work The Rivers Are Our Brothers was recorded by Grammy-winning ensemble Chanticleer.
Connery holds a Ph.D. in musicology and has taught at Stanford, UC Berkeley, Princeton, and inside New York state prisons. She performs as a solo artist and with her art-rock duo Sky Creature, frightening and delighting audiences everywhere from high-art institutions to dive bars and DIY spaces. Whether in a concert hall or under the stars, Connery’s work transforms sound into a vehicle for connection—wild, unguarded, and alive.
In radio, Connery hosts the NPR/CapRadio podcast A Music of Their Own and Reverberations with New Amsterdam Records. She holds a PhD in musicology from the University of Chicago and an A.B. in music from Princeton.
LONG BIO:
Majel Connery is an unclassifiable artist whose work moves effortlessly between the concert hall and the punk rock club, between the sublime and the guttural, between the deeply personal and the ecologically cosmic.
A composer, vocalist, and storyteller, Connery uses the tools of electronic processing and classical form to create music that gives voice to the natural world. Her immersive performances have appeared everywhere from The Kennedy Center and The Kitchen to DIY venues and dive bars. The New York Times has called her singing “superb”; the Wall Street Journal described her compositions as “thoroughly Schubertian.”
Connery’s song cycle The Rivers Are Our Brothers, a meditation on ecological interdependence, has been performed across the U.S. and abroad in multiple arrangements—including a 2023–24 tour with Grammy-winning choir Chanticleer and a performance with Australia’s Bowerbird Collective at the Carmel Bach Festival. Her most recent project, Elderflora, premiered at Seattle Symphony’s Octave 9 and has toured to The Exploratorium (San Francisco) and UNM ArtsLab. With her NYC-based art-rock duo Sky Creature (with Matt Walsh), she has appeared at Crystal Bridges Museum, BAMPFA, the Speed Art Museum, the Stanley Museum of Art, and the Knoxville Museum of Art, fusing raw energy with ethereal beauty.
She is also the host and creator of A Music of Their Own, an NPR podcast on women in music (CapRadio/New Amsterdam Records), and of Reverberations, a podcast for New Amsterdam Records. Her interest in radio began in 2019 with Radiolab’s Gonads series, for which she co-created music for five episodes—work that became Radiolab’s first-ever digital album release.
In academia, Connery has held artist residencies and professorships at Princeton, Stanford, UC Berkeley, Wellesley, and the University of Chicago, and continues to teach from the road, offering artist talks and guest lectures at institutions including UVA, the University of Iowa, Reed College, Cornish College of the Arts, and UNM Albuquerque.
From 2007 to 2018, Connery co-founded and ran Opera Cabal, an experimental opera company and think tank for creative and scholarly work on opera. The company’s production of ATTHIS at The Kitchen was hailed as “mesmerizing” by The New York Times.
Connery holds a Ph.D. in musicology and an M.A. in ethnomusicology from the University of Chicago, and an A.B. in music from Princeton University. She lives part-time in Catskill, NY, and part-time in the world at large—bringing her wild, warm, and transformative music wherever it’s needed most.
“the sultry music was superb when Majel Connery was airily singing”
“devotees of new music have long been enthralled by the work of vocalist and composer Majel Connery”
“The depth and control of her voice betray her classical vocal training, but like kindred spirit Shara Nova, Connery chooses a more straightforward sound that suits the emotional content of her work.”
—John Schaefer/New Sounds
“excellent vocals”
“REGINA SPECTOR-LIKE VOCALS”
“haunting, Bjork-like vocals”
“…uninflected and vibrato-free, alternately borrowing from the interpretive sophistication of jazz or musical theater and the deliberate naivete of folk-rock.”
—Wall Street Journal
“smooth, sultry vocals”
“Majel Connery has achieved the practically impossible.”