A soprano and multi-instrumentalist whose life in music keeps returning to a single question. What makes a thing beautiful enough to carry a prayer?
Christa Marie Dalmazio is a soprano and conductor from Colts Neck, New Jersey. Her training began at the Ranney School, where she studied voice with Cynthia Springsteen and sang with the Concordia Youth Chorale, touring France and Canada as a choral soloist. She went on to the Manhattan School of Music, earning a bachelor's and master's in vocal performance and, this spring, a Doctor of Musical Arts, studying throughout with the celebrated soprano Catherine Malfitano. The Metropolitan Opera's Laffont Competition named her an Encouragement Award winner three years running (2018–2020), and as a young singer she took a Merit Award in Classical Voice from the National YoungArts Foundation. She has sung as a soloist at Carnegie Hall and Avery Fisher Hall, and in churches on both sides of the Atlantic.
She plays the harp, organ, piano, viola, violin, and cello, and offers private lessons besides. But the center of her work is sacred music. As music director of the Higher Word Orchestra and director of music for parishes and schools across New Jersey, she has received a vocation and built a life around the Church's via pulchritudinis, the way of beauty.
It is an old idea, and a demanding one. She returns to it in thinkers like Dietrich von Hildebrand and Roger Scruton. The medieval test for beauty asked three things of a work. It must be whole, well proportioned, and radiant. Christa listens for those same qualities in a line of chant or a Mozart aria, and tries to give them back to a congregation at prayer.
Panis angelicus fit panis hominumThe Bread of Angels becomes the Bread of men
Christa's scholarship and most of her singing return to one center, the Holy Eucharist.
Her dissertation examines the sacred solo repertoire most fitting for the Mass, the music that belongs before the altar.
Fiat cor meum immaculatum, ut non confundarLet my heart be undefiled, that I be not confounded
Anima hominis symphoniam in se habetThe human soul holds a symphony within itself
For performances, sacred-music direction, private lessons, or music for a wedding or event, write to Christa directly.
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