Gilda Lyons

[4] She made her professional debut as both vocal soloist and composer in her own orchestral song cycle "Feis" (poetry of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, 1997) with the American Symphony Orchestra, Leon Botstein conducting.

[8] She has commissioned and performed premières of works by numerous living composers, including Kathryn Alexander, Juhi Bansal, Hayes Biggs, Robert Carl, Chen S’iang, Jesse D’Aiello, Stephen Dembski, Jed Distler, Kaeza Fearn, Daniel Felsenfeld, Daniel Gilliam, Daron Hagen, Wang Jie, Paula Kimper, Wendy Wan'ki Lee, Katarina Leyman, Eli Marshall, Jorge Martin, Daphna Mor, Frank Oteri, Glen Roven, David Rakowski, Jessica Rudman, She Ye, Faye-Ellen Silverman, Daniel Sonenberg, Dennis Tobenski, Craig Urquhart, Barbara White, Beth Wiemann, Peter Winkler, Randall Woolf, and Zhou Xu.

Lyons has received commissions from, among others, the ASCAP Foundation / Charles Kingsford Fund, American Opera Projects, Amy Pivar Dances, the Beijing New Music Ensemble, ComposersCollaborative Inc., Fort Greene Park Conservancy, Paul Sperry, Two Sides Sounding, Adrienne Dandrich, Thomas Bagwell, the Finisterra Trio, Entelechron Trio, Kyo-Shin-An Arts, the 5 Borough Music Festival, the AIDS Quilt Songbook at Twenty, Mirror Visions, IonSound, Sweet Plantain String Quartet, and The Walt Whitman Project.

Tom Strini in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel described "Nahuatl Hymn to the Earth Mother" for treble choir as “hair-raising, yet elegant, [with] slides, dips, yips and yelps amid ceremonial intensity.

"[10] (Clarion CLCD-936) The wide range of her textual sources embraces poetry by grade school children in the Bronx "Songs from the F Train", (commissioned by American Opera Projects, and published by Schott, 2010),[11] the Anne Sexton-inspired solo voice cycle "A Small Handful" (EC Schirmer, 2006),[12] and even "transforms acronyms, route numbers and letters and a listing of transit-authority service changes into a comic soprano and mezzo-soprano duet [called] rapid transit".