Rebecca Sacks

(She/her)

Rebecca Sacks is a Boston-based composer and teacher. She has been on the Powers staff for the past seven years, teaching the music theory and composition classes and private lessons to students of all ages and levels. Rebecca’s teaching is informed by her early studies of jazz and classical piano, her work as a composer, and her own continued learning in recent years. From 2019–2021, she studied music theory (solfège, dictations, and 4-part harmony writing) with Judith Ross, who taught music theory at the Longy School of Music for 37 years, and whose innovative teaching methods Rebecca has adopted at Powers.

Rebecca completed an MFA in Composition and Music Theory from Brandeis University, and she graduated from Tufts University with a BA in Music. Since 2008, Rebecca has taught private lessons in jazz and classical piano, music theory and composition. She also taught music theory, composition, and choral singing in Tufts University’s Community Music Program. While at Brandeis, Rebecca studied music theory with Yu-Hui Chang and Martin Boykan (emeritus professor), and she studied composition with Chang, Boykan, Eric Chasalow, and Melinda Wagner. As an undergraduate at Tufts, Rebecca studied music theory with Janet Schmalfeldt, composition with John McDonald, and West African music with David Locke.

In addition to Rebecca’s piano background (classical and jazz), she has studied choral singing, jazz voice, and West African music of the Ewe tribe (of Ghana and Togo). She is a member of the Agbekor Society, a West African singing and drumming group; and she sings with Cantilena, a women’s choir.

Rebecca’s training included participation in the European American Musical Alliance Summer Composition Program at the Schola Cantorum in Paris, where she studied counterpoint, harmony, and analysis in the tradition of Nadia Boulanger. While at Tufts, Rebecca received the Etta and Harry Winokur Award for Outstanding Achievement in Artistic or Scholarly Work from their Music Department. In 2007, she was a finalist at the Ithaca College Choral Composition Festival for her composition “The Mirror,” which was performed the previous year in Spain by the Tufts Chamber Singers.

Her compositions have been performed by Chorus pro Musica, the Talea Ensemble, the Talujon Percussion Group, members of the Radnofsky Saxophone Quartet, the University of Alabama’s Percussion Ensemble, the Genkin Philharmonic, the Tufts University Chamber Singers and the Tufts University Concert Choir (under both Andrew Clark and Jamie Kirsch), Tufts’ West African Percussion Ensemble, the Camberville Somerchoir, the Cardamom String Quartet, the Arlington-Belmont Chamber Chorus, the Mockingbird Trio, and the Cantata Singers of Elmira, NY, as well as other freelance musicians in the Boston area. Rebecca’s solo piano piece “One at a Time” is included on Thomas Stumpf’s 2017 CD with Albany Records entitled “Reflections on Time and Mortality.”