Composer Francine Trester attended the Julliard Pre-College Division as a violinist and received her B.A. at Yale University. As a violinist, she has been a student of Syoko Aki, a member of the Alexander Schneider N. Y. String Orchestra and a Tanglewood Fellowship recipient. Later pursing compositional studies with Jacob Druckman and Martin Bresnick, she received the M.M., M.M.A. and D.M.A. degrees in composition at the Yale School of Music. In 1994 she received a Fullbright Scholarship to study composition in England with Alexander Goehr at Cambridge University. A self-taught pianist, she also worked as an accompanist and Assistant to the Directors of Live Wires and Live Culture at the English National Opera and as Composer-in-Residence at the Queenswood School.
Upon her return to the United States in 1996, Trester assumed a position as Assistant Professor of Music at Austin College. In 1998 she received the ASCAP Foundation Morton Gould Young Composer Award. She has been commissioned to write for baritone Richard Lalli, the Mirror Visions Ensemble, the Arianna String Quartet, the Yale Collegium Musicum, trumpeter John Holt (University of North Texas), soprano Patricia Prunty, and mezzo-soprano Mary Ann Hart. Additionally, she has written for faculty at the University of Akron, West Texas A&M University, Austin College, soprano Jayne West, and contralto Elizabeth Anker.
Recent performances of her works include premieres at Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall, Florence Gould Hall, the Kosciusko Foundation and the Joseph Papp Public Theater. Her compositions have also recently been performed at Yale, Wesleyan, and Tufts University, M.I.T., the Longy School of Music and the First and Second Church in Boston. Elizabeth Anker has performed her music at the Old First Church in San Francisco, on KALW radio in San Francisco and WGBH radio in Boston. Recordings include a performance by the Mirror Visions Ensemble on the Albany Records label, and a trumpet composition for John Holt on Crystal Records.
Trester was a faculty member of the Yale School of Music from 2000-2002. She later served on the faculties of the Longy School of Music and Tufts University. Currently, she is an Associate Professor of Composition at Berklee College of Music. Trester is the recent recipient of a Berklee Faculty recording grant, and last year, as a member of the Boston based new music group Composers in Red Sneakers, she received a commission from the Fromm Music Foundation at Harvard University.
Trester’s song cycle, Bus 66, was performed at Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall in May 2005. This year, she received a Massachusetts Cultural Council grant to write the cycle Domestic Affairs for contralto Elizabeth Anker, pianist John McDonald and violist Scott Woolweaver. Also this year, Trester has been commissioned to write for the Providence Mandolin Orchestra, guitar duo Mark and Beverly Davis, trumpeter John Holt and mezzo-soprano Sophie Creech, the Wheeler School Handbell Choir, and the Merrimack Valley Philharmonic Orchestra.