Composer Betsy Lackey
October Family Discovery Concert: Robin Hood
All ASO guest artists appear through the generosity
of the Maurice and Dorothy Stubnitz Foundation Guest Artist Fund.
Betsy Lackey
When Betsy Lackey was four, she pointed to a billboard and told her father that she wanted one of those. So he bought it for her. It was a piano.
Betsy started playing piano before she could read and has been making up melodies for as long as she can remember. In fact, writing music is one of the things that brought Betsy and her husband Michael together. They started talking about ideas for musicals when they first met (Michael writes the lyrics and scripts) and have been writing together ever since.
It wasn’t until 1984, when Michael and Betsy wrote A Dragon’s Tale, a musical produced by the Croswell Opera House in Adrian, that she began to realize that not everyone heard the music she was hearing in her head. It was then that she learned that she was thinking symphonically. For many years she was afraid to actually write out all of the parts and relied on her good friend and mentor, Jerry DePuit, to edit her work and orchestrate it.
However, both Jerry and ASO conductor John Dodson had other plans for Betsy, and finally they encouraged her to create her own orchestrations when she composed Jack and the Beanstalk for the ASO family concert in 2006.
Robin Hood is Betsy’s fourth commissioned piece for the ASO family concerts. She also produced the music for Jack and the Beanstalk, Pinocchio and The Ugly Duckling family discovery concerts. Other works she has composed include Frankenstein (for orchestra and singers), which has been performed with the ASO as well as Gold Country Orchestra in Sacramento, Clifornia, A Dragon’s Tale, Nightingale, and dozens of songs that have been written for various special events and weddings.