Malcolm Dalglish

1997 Commissioned Composer

Malcolm Dalglish is a choral composer and director, hammer dulcimer, spoons, bones, and chin music virtuoso who presents programs of original folk choir and dulcimer music, stories, mime, rhyme, rhythm, and song.

“a metamagical experience”—Austin Chronicle

“The youngest of a large family of artists and educators, I grew up in a household where more than ideas were bouncing off the walls.  Poetry, painting, music, and theater were intermingled with little league baseball, raising chickens, and building backyard junkyard playhouses.”

“Two years of (American) Boychoir and a Hail Mary pass through the rest of school landed me on the steps of Oberlin College.  There I joined an avant-garde theater group with some amazingly gifted cohorts who, like me, were dredging up from the depths of their psyches connections to the resounding mythologies of our time.  Too bad the audience never got it.  Somewhere in that mythological morass I found an empty place that could only be filled by music, something I’d abandoned way back in my Boychoir days.  I was tired of befuddling audiences.  I wanted to entertain them.  That’s when the dulcimer came on the scene.”

Swift—commissioned for YNS in 1997