Ashi Day’s vocally driven works explore the intersections between music and theater; strategic humor and absurdity; the interplay between the experiences of performers, audiences, and the canon; and animal songs. Her operas, art songs, choral pieces, and theatrical works have been commissioned or performed by Whistling Hens, Hartford Opera Theater, KC Vitas, Fresh Squeezed Opera, Renegade Opera, Artifice, Juventas New Music Ensemble, Calliope’s Call, N.E.O. Voice Festival, Choral Arts Initiative, Cappella Clausura, Denison TUTTI, StageFree, District New Music Coalition, Cantate Chamber Singers, and more. She has collaborated with multidisciplinary artists to co-create theatrical shows for DC’s Source Festival and the Capital Fringe Festival. She has four operas for which she was the composer-librettist: The Fishwife, a reimagining of the Grimm fable about greed, “The Fisherman and His Wife”; Waking the Witch, an immersive chamber opera in which the audience plays an accused witch interrogated by a zealous witchfinder; For Whom the Dog Tolls, a mini-opera about a Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever; and The Green Child, for clarinet and soprano, an imagining of the legend of the Green Children of Woolpit. She is a DC Arts and Humanities Fellow and an Opera America Discovery Grants for Women Composers awardee. Ashi earned her BM and MM in Composition at Bucknell University and Westminster Choir College, respectively, and her EdM in Arts in Education at Harvard. In addition to composing, she manages several education programs for the Washington National Opera and sings professionally as a church musician.
