Heliotrope a Suite of Six Dances for Woodwind Quintet (1981)
The Winds of Aeolus (1981)
Quintet of the Americas was introduced to Kathleen St. John when Jeannie Poole, organizer for the First International Congress on Women in Music at New York University in 1981, asked us to perform a piece by Kathleen on a program at the congress. We premiered The Winds of Aeolus on that concert.
Kathleen St. John has received numerous commissions from repertory companies, universities, and individual performers throughout this country and abroad. She was a Tanglewood Fellow studying under the British composer Alexander Goehr, a guest lecturer (twice!) at the University of Ottawa Department of Music, composer-in-residence at the American Dance Festival of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina and at the Charles Ives Center in New Milford, Connecticut, and has received five Fellowships from both MacDowell and the Virginia Center For The Creative Arts. In 1976, she was designated a Norlin Foundation Fellow by MacDowell in special tribute to Aaron Copland. St. John received her M.F.A. in music composition from California Institute of the Arts in 1979 where she was mentored by Mel Powell, was pianist for the CalArts Twentieth-Century Players Ensemble under the direction of Morton Subotnick, and was graduate assistant to pianist Leonid Hambro. Upon graduation, she became a member of their theory and piano faculty.