Benedict Sheehan: Gestures of Music

GRAMMY®-nominated conductor and composer Benedict Sheehan has been called “a choral conductor and composer to watch in the 21st century” (Linda Holt, ConcertoNet) and “one of the most important voices in American Orthodox choral music” (Choral Journal). He is Artistic Director of the Saint Tikhon Choir and Artefact Ensemble, as well as Director of Music at St. Tikhon’s Monastery and Seminary in Pennsylvania. His Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom (Cappella Records, 2020), on which he conducts the Saint Tikhon Choir, received a 2022 GRAMMY® nomination for Best Choral Performance, the 2021 American Prize in Choral Conducting (2nd Place) and Choral Composition (Best Use of Traditional Elements), and has garnered critical acclaim.

His innovative choral “story score” was featured on Skylark Vocal Ensemble’s GRAMMY®-nominated album Once Upon A Time (2021), and hailed as “evocative” (Gramophone), “extraordinary” (Limelight), “brilliant” (MetroWest Daily News), and “otherworldly” (Boston Musical Intelligencer), and his most recent collaboration with Skylark, A Christmas Carol, was released in November of 2021 and named the “#1 Top Pick of 2021 in Classical & Opera” by Textura. The 2021-22 concert season will feature performances of Sheehan’s music, including several newly-commissioned works, by Conspirare, Cappella Romana, Skylark, the Houston Chamber Choir, Artefact Ensemble, the Saint Tikhon Choir, the Schola Corvorum of Benedictine College, and the Portland State Chamber Choir at the World Choir Expo in Lisbon, Portugal. In the fall of 2021 Sheehan conducted Artefact Ensemble in the world premiere of Arvo Pärt’s latest work, O Holy Father Nicholas, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

His music is published by Oxford University Press, Artefact Publications, Musica Russica, and others. He lives and works in Pennsylvania with his wife, vocalist and music educator Talia Maria Sheehan, and together they have seven daughters ranging in age from five to twenty-one. He writes his music in a tiny office that he calls his “cupboard under the stairs,” where he is currently working on (among other things) an oratorio for chorus, narrator, and chamber orchestra called Akathist in collaboration with fantasy novelist Nicholas Kotar.