Deborah Fischer Teason was born and raised in the Hudson River Valley and has studied and performed music since her early childhood. She began composing at the age of fourteen, received her degree in music theory and composition from Arizona State University where she premiered 25 works in five years, and studied composition privately with John Corigliano, Thea Musgrave and Martin Bresnick.

Ms. Teason has composed extensively for chamber ensemble, chorus and orchestra.  Over the past twenty years her commissions have included works for Opera Omaha, the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra, the Wall Street Chamber Players, the New Haven Chorale and numerous soloists.

Many of Ms. Teason’s projects involve collaborations with professional, amateur and student musicians, often from widely divergent backgrounds.  She worked with the Bridgeport Public Schools and the Greater Bridgeport Symphony to create four choral works over eight years that were written with inner city school students and performed by the symphony on subscription concerts. In 1999 she received a Continental Harmony commission from the American Composers Forum to create music for a small farming town in Nebraska. The completed work, Heartland, brought together a community choir, button accordion players, a Czech brass band, a children’s choir and a solo violinist, and was chosen to represent the Continental Harmony Project at the 2000 meeting of the National Council of the Arts in Washington DC. In 2003, Opera Omaha premiered Bloodlines, an opera which Ms. Teason wrote in collaboration with high school students from South Omaha and which brought together on stage national level singers, community professionals and high school singers. She also directed the award-winning Children’s Original Opera Project in Connecticut for ten years.

A chance introduction to playing in a steelband twelve years ago has grown into a serious commitment to teaching and expanding the repertoire of the steel pan. Ms. Teason currently directs and arranges for four steelband programs in Connecticut, including the highly regarded St. Luke’s Steel Band, recipient of the 2003 Greater New Haven Arts Council Artist Award. In 2002 her concerto for steelband and orchestra, Trinity, was commissioned and premiered by the Waterbury Symphony. She is recently completed Cadences for steel pan and string quartet, which was premiered by the renowned soloist Liam Teague and the Vermeer Quartet in Chicago in December 2006.