–By Brandon
Morten Lauridsen, who wrote our 2016 holiday show’s setting of “O Nata Lux,” is a native of the Pacific Northwest, having attended Whitman College in Walla Walla and served as a firefighter for the Forest Service near Mount St. Helens, and currently spends his summers in the San Juan Islands. He has been a professor of composition at University of Southern California since 1967. He was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 2007, and was named an American Choral Master by the National Endowment for the Arts in 2006. Although he has written a number of classical choral works, he also specializes in film scoring–including the documentary about his life, Shining Night: A Portrait of Composer Morten Lauridsen, featuring Giselle Wyers, a UW professor and friend of Choir of the Sound.