Leanna Kirchoff

A native of rural Colorado, Leanna Kirchoff’s music career began in a farmyard, singing her own songs to an audience of family and a few barn cats. Her early musical development also included studying piano and accompanying the choir at her local church. Kirchoff credits these early experiences as the genesis for her work as a composer whose catalog of music has grown to include many kinds of songs, musical theater pieces, sacred and non-liturgical choral music, and operas.

Her chamber operas often examine women’s experiences featuring female characters and performers: The Clever Artifice of Harriet and Margaret (2013), Scrapbookers (2015), Friday After Friday (2019), and Welcome to the Madness (2024), each explore the female perspective on marriage, sisterhood, surviving war, and womens’ pioneering spirit. Kirchoff’s operas have been performed at universities and opera companies across the United States, including Opera Steamboat, Tufts University, the University of Miami Frost School of Music, the University of Missouri-St. Louis, Missouri State University, Opera del West, Gateway Opera, Really Spicy Opera, and others.

Kirchoff has been recognized with awards and grants from OPERA America, the National Opera Association, the American Composers Forum, the International Alliance of Women in Music, and the Sorel Organization. She is profiled in So You Want to Sing Music by Women, published by the National Association of Teachers of Singing. She has been commissioned by Opera Steamboat, the Boulder Philharmonic, Ars Nova Singers, The Playground Ensemble, Soprani Compagni, the Colorado State Music Teachers Association, Stages Theatre Company, and others.

Expanding upon her work as a composer, Kirchoff has created visuals for A Recurrent Dream While Driving West Near Sand Creek, an audio-visual piece with composer Chris Malloy on the topic of the Sand Creek Massacre. The piece has been showcased at the International Computer Music Conference in Daegu, South Korea, the International Congress of Science and Music Technology in Buenos Aires, Argentina and the Sangre de Cristo Arts Center (Pueblo, Colorado) for the exhibition, “Representing the West: A New Frontier.” Their second collaboration, A Preponderance of Evidence, focuses on climate change.

Recent projects include Welcome to the Madness for Opera Steamboat, a new opera premiered in summer 2024 celebrating the Perry Mansfield Performing Arts Camp; Holy Waters: Font for the Lamont School of Music Wind Ensemble adapted from Kirchoff’s original choral version; Divine Cloud That We Share for oboe, clarinet, and piano premiered at the 2022 International Double Reed Society Conference; East Wing Songs – Volume 1, the first edition in a series of art songs celebrating the First Ladies of the United States, premiered in Canton, Ohio, home of the First Ladies Library and Museum. Recordings of her choral pieces, Meciendo and Holy Waters (choral version) are slated for release by Navona Records in Fall 2024.

Kirchoff completed her Doctorate of Musical Arts degree from the University of Colorado, where she studied composition with Daniel Kellogg, Carter Pann, Michael Theodore, and Richard Toensing. She also holds a Master of Arts in Composition from the University of Minnesota where she studied with Dominick Argento and Judith Lang Zaimont. She has been a composition fellow at the John Duffy Institute, the Ernest Bloch Festival, the Rural America New Music Festival, and the Chamber Music Conference and Composers Forum of the East. She teaches composition at the University of Denver.