BIOGRAPHY

A gritty, imaginative wayfinder, Zoe Yost centers her artistic life at the crossroads.  Her voice springs from the integration of performance, composition, and creative writing, as well as painting and photography, and she finds inspiration everywhere from the Schoodic Peninsula to New York City.  A social and environmental activist, she believes in the power and responsibility of artists to enrich and care for society, and frequently places her craft at the service of her community.

 

Zoe studies viola and composition at San Francisco Conservatory of Music, where her private teachers are Dimitri Murrath and Dr. David Conte.  Her past viola teachers include Kerri Ryan, Sheila Browne, Esme Allen-Creighton, and Kathleen Hastings.  Her prior composition teacher was Dr. Donna Beech.

 

In February 2024, she was the winner of SFCM’s Low Strings Concerto Competition, and previously received awards in the Telegraph Players Chamber Competition, the Temple University Music Prep Concerto Competition, the Caprio Young Artists Competition, and the Grand Prize Virtuoso Bonn and Salzburg Competitions.  She has performed chamber music alongside artists including Melissa White, the Telegraph String Quartet, and the Jasper String Quartet.  She attended Bowdoin International Music Festival 2018-23, where she studied privately with Dimitri Murrath, Carol Rodland, and Kirsten Docter, and studied chamber music with Phillip Ying, Liz Freivogel, Kathryn Votapek, and Tao Lin.  She also attended Valdres Sommersymfoni, a festival in Norway, in summer 2019.  She served as principal violist of Temple University Music Prep’s Youth Chamber Orchestra 2017-22, and held a scholarship position in Settlement Music School’s Trowbridge Advanced Study String Quartet 2017-18 and 2020-22.

 

Since arriving at SFCM in Fall 2022, she has served three times as principal violist of the SFCM Orchestra.  Her activities as a violist at SFCM include semesterly recitals, often including her compositions, and she frequently participates in recording and sampling sessions led by SFCM majors in Technology and Applied Composition.  In 2023, she collaborated with Pierre and Miguel Mariaca on an electroacoustic production by Kinetech Arts.

 

Zoe is deeply committed to new music, and performed fifteen works by living composers in the 2023-24 season, in addition to four of her own.  Her recent composition projects include Veils: A Symphonic Poem; a choral setting of Walt Whitman’s O Me! O Life!; a viola ensemble work for the 2024 Murrath studio recital; a Pastorale for flute, viola, and piano; a choral setting of O salutaris Hostia; and an art song setting of William Blake’s The Lamb, commissioned by Lower Brandywine Presbyterian Church.  

 

Her music has been premiered, often with her on viola, by artists including David Friend, members of the International Contemporary Ensemble, Genevieve Hahn, Choral Chameleon Ensemble, and San Francisco Choral Artists.  Her flute, viola, and cello trio, A Midsummer’s Daydream, was the winner of Eight Strings and a Whistle’s 2024 Composer Competition, and will be premiered by the trio in New York City in November 2024.  

 

In August 2024, Zoe conducted the inaugural Lower Brandywine Choral Festival (LBCF), a weeklong community choral program dedicated to building fellowship through music, while introducing music lovers to the vast choral repertoire and bringing choral music to those who have few opportunities to sing.  LBCF functions under the auspices of Lower Brandywine Presbyterian Church (LBPC) in Wilmington, Delaware.  2019-22, Zoe was an active participant in LBPC’s Senior Choir, as a conductor, a salaried alto, a soprano and alto soloist, and a collaborative pianist.  She also sang alto in University of Delaware’s Schola Cantorum, 2018-20, and SFCM Conservatory Chorus, 2023-24.

 

Zoe is a published poet in Delaware Libraries’s IMAZINE and in anthologies by the Live Poets Society of New Jersey.  In 2020 and 2021, she received two Silver Keys in poetry from the Scholastic Writing Awards.  She is writing a series of novels, entitled Stargazer, accompanied by an original musical score and, in the future, original illustrations.  Her writing mentors have included Carl Nagin, JoAnn Balingit, and William Hahn.  Zoe is also a visual artist, and her paintings and photography have been featured by the Wilmington Art Loop and the Entomological Society of America. 

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Though largely preoccupied by musical pursuits, Zoe maintains long-standing academic interests, particularly in languages, history, and science.  In 2020 and 2021, she won two Gold Medals in the National German Exam, given by the American Association of Teachers of German.  2021-22, she studied French informally.  Of all the scientific disciplines, she enjoys geology, theoretical physics, and ornithology most.

 

Since childhood, Zoe has had a passion for conservation and citizen science.  Between the ages of seven and fifteen, she raised over $7,500 for the Delaware Bird-A-Thon, a project dedicated to purchasing and protecting fragile bird habitat along the Delaware Bayshore.  As a dedicated birdwatcher, she gave presentations on owls and hummingbirds for the Delmarva Ornithological Society and Delaware Valley Ornithological Club in 2014, 2015, and 2016.  She was also a bird banding assistant to Dr. Ian Stewart of the Delaware Nature Society 2017-19, and became a Delaware Nature Society Certified Naturalist in 2015.

 

Her dedication to community service also manifests itself through music.  Zoe has performed as a volunteer and for fundraisers in many settings, including retirement homes, hospitals, schools, churches, and farmers’ markets.  In February 2024, she and two SFCM colleagues, violinist Hannah Schafer and pianist Cesonia da Rosa, co-directed a benefit concert for Compass Family Services, an organization which aids homeless families in San Francisco.  Two months later, she assisted her viola professor, Dimitri Murrath, in presenting a Music For Food benefit concert.  The closing performance of the Lower Brandywine Choral Festival raised over $800 for the Food Bank of Delaware.  Zoe intends to continue and expand her philanthropic work as her career evolves.​

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For shorter versions of this biography, please visit my viola and composition pages.