Biography

Full bio:

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Austin-based Marjorie Halloran, originally from the San Francisco Bay Area, is a synesthetic composer, singer, and songwriter.  Her love of music began early with preschool piano lessons and singing in kindergarten church choir, ensuring that she would be a musician forever and never live a “normal life”. Throughout her teen years, she dabbled in flute, guitar, electric bass, and played in a handbell choir, but her true love has always been singing with others. 

 

An accomplished choral singer in addition to composer, Halloran has performed with many different ensembles in the Bay Area, as well as in Princeton, NJ, New York City, Dublin, Ireland, and the University of California at Davis, where she received her BA in music theory/composition.  She is the co-founder of the Choral Workshop program for composition students at the Vermont College of Fine Arts in Montpelier, VT, where she received her MFA in composition with an emphasis in songwriting and served as Assistant Director for the Music Composition program. Marjorie has studied compositions with Michael Early, Jonathan Bailey Holland, Don DiNicola, Abbie Betinis, and Alice Parker, among others. She currently sings with and writes for Chorus Austin and Inversion Ensemble of Austin, TX, and plays viola with and composes for the Austin Philharmonic Orchestra. 

 

Halloran’s compositions have been performed by ensembles in Texas, California, Minnesota, Oregon, New Jersey, Missouri, Vermont, and even as far abroad as Australia.  She has done a variety of arrangements as well, including “Venus as a Boy” at a concert of Björk’s music in 2023. 

 

She is the winner of the 2015-16 WomenSing "Youth Inspiring Youth" choral composition competition, and her piece "8 Ways to Look at a Window" was premiered in June 2016. She was also a finalist for the I Kromatika composition competition in 2015, a semi-finalist for the American Prize in Composition (choral division) in 2018, and a finalist for the American Prize in 2022.

 

Halloran released her debut pop album, Ready for Anything, on August 3, 2015, featuring a variety of songs she wrote during her years studying at VCFA, followed by two “Pandemic Sessions” limited albums in 2020 and 2021. Many of her pop songs can be heard on her SoundCloud and YouTube channels, and she can occasionally be heard singing (or rapping) in other projects with her band, One Touch Relief, throughout the internet.

 

Halloran loves biodegradable glitter, peanut butter, chords in first inversion, The Little Mermaid, and reading alto clef. An avid traveler, she has visited all fifty US states (including Puerto Rico and Washington, DC) and all seven continents, including camping in Antarctica, snorkeling in Bora Bora, and a summer studying in South Korea. She has a husband, two cats, a green Prius, and an obsession with rainbows, and when she isn’t writing music or performing with an ensemble, she’s probably either playing Stardew Valley on her Steam Deck or writing niche Stardew Valley fanfiction. 

 

Her choral music can be found on MusicSpoke and JW Pepper’s MyScore, while her pop music can be found on Bandcamp. (She can be found on Spotify and Apple Music, too, but she’s not proud of it, due to the problematic lack of revenue for artists on streaming platforms.)