Born in Wichita Falls, Texas in 1962, Susan Botti is a composer and singer who derives her aesthetic from theater and the visual arts. Often a vocal soloist as well as a composer of her works, her music draws on traditional, improvisational, and non-classical compositions and styles. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, The Rome Prize, the Goddard Lieberson Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, grants and commissions from the National Endowment for the Arts, and many others, and has also collaborated with high-profile artists such as musicians from the New York Philharmonic and The Orpheus Chamber Orchestra.

Along with her many honors, Botti was composer-in-residence during the Alabama Symphony’s 2016-17 season as part of the “Sound Investments” program. Part of her residency included a commission—and the result was Glaze, a 14-minute work for orchestra based on the process of creating pottery. As Botti told music writer Michael Huebner before the work's premiere on February 3, 2017, under the direction of Carlos Izcaray,

The piece is inspired by the idea of glazing. Having a couple of profound experiences in museums, I was struck by the humbleness of making a pot. Some pieces were created a thousand years ago, shaped by somebody's hand, and accidentally changed when they went into fire. As you start learning more about the process, it becomes a metaphoric process—the idea that you created something hands-on and put it into fire, where anything can happen. It's an interesting meditation. I suppose performance is a form of putting it into the fire. We let go, pass it on and it becomes something else, yet there's still this human connection.

As Huebner described the music,

Like much of Botti's work, “Glaze” is lucid and meticulously crafted. The orchestra serves as a palette from which textures and colors arise, transform and blend. Although the orchestration occasionally expands to full-throated volume, it generally maintains a minimal, understated tension ornamented by percussion, harp and violin solos. Botti seems less concerned with the literal or visual representation of pottery than with the creative process, best illustrated through her slowly evolving, sustained harmonies. They invite listeners to absorb and experience them, even after the music subsides.

©Jennifer More, 2021