Bradley Ellingboe

conductor, bass, & Artistic Director

Bradley Ellingboe has led a wide-ranging career in the world of singing, including accomplishments as a choral conductor, soloist, composer, scholar, and teacher. As a choral conductor, he has led festival choruses in 35 states and 14 countries. As a bass-baritone soloist, he has sung under such conductors as Robert Shaw, Helmuth Rilling, and Sir David Willcocks. Ellingboe has more than 160 pieces of music in print, including his Requiem for chorus and orchestra, which has been performed more than 300 times in this country and Europe. For his scholarly work in making the songs of Edvard Grieg more accessible to the English-speaking public, he was knighted by the King of Norway in 1994. As a teacher, the University of New Mexico Alumni Association named him Faculty of the Year in 2008.

Bradley Ellingboe retired in 2015 after serving on the faculty of the University of New Mexico for 30 years, where he was Director of Choral Activities, Professor of Music, and Regents Lecturer. He is a graduate of Saint Olaf College and the Eastman School of Music and has done further study at the Aspen Music Festival, the Bach Aria Festival, the University of Oslo, and the Vatican. 

Ellingboe has won annual awards for his choral compositions from ASCAP—the American Society of Composers, Arrangers, and Publishers—since 2000. His choral music is widely sung and has been performed and recorded by such groups as the Santa Fe Desert Chorale, VocalEssence, the Saint Olaf Choir, the Harvard Glee Club, Conspirare, and the choirs of the University of Michigan and Luther College, among many others. Beginning in the summer of 2020, he will be Composer-in-Residence for Albany Pro Musica. 

He lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico, with his wife Karen. They are the parents of three children and have four grandchildren. Ellingboe is Director of Choirs at the United Church of Santa Fe and founder and artistic director of Albuquerque’s Coro Lux (“Chorus of Light”).