Composers
Santorini degli Archangeli
-About
Santorini degli Archangeli (they/them/their) is a Jamaican-born composer, conductor, and tenor-sopranist whose artistic output spans sacred, secular, political, and autobiographical works for piano, voice, chorus, among others. They began to teach themself music theory at the age of 7, later going on to study Music Education and Literacy Development at the Mico Teachers’ College; (Classical) Vocal Performance at The Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts, and Vocal Performance (Opera) at Alcorn State University. They are also Safe Space Certified by the Family and Youth Services Bureau of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services; Suicide Prevention Training by Kognito; and Dealing with Diversity in the Workplace by Global Mindset. They desire to attain full CPR and First Aid certification in the near future. They are a concert performer, who has performed in Jamaica and the United States, and Founder and Conductor of the currently disbanded Il Coro Accademia Trascendenza. They are passionate about the Culinary Arts; Latin Dancing, Writing, Human and LGBT Rights activism on an individual scale, and great lover of Nature and animals. A little known fact is that they are ordained with the Church of Spiritual Humanism, which they did to fulfil the wishes of a couple of friends who wanted them to officiate their wedding. They have also maintained a blog, Dreams on a Battlefield… since 2009.
Santorini is a direct vocal descendant of Elena Obraztsova, through their teacher Pauline Forrest-Watson (trained in Russia), inheriting a lineage of Slavic vocal strength and lyricism. They are a listed composer in the Music by Black Composers – Living Composers Directory, the Institute for Composer Diversity, and the Music Unites Jamaica Foundation’s Jamaican Composers (pending) directories, among others. Perhaps most notably, they are openly Queer, a truth that carries profound meaning given the deeply rooted homophobic exceptionalism that is a widely recognised feature of their homeland, Jamaica, and across much of the Caribbean. This personal identity deeply informs their artistic language and the emotional urgency of their work.