About
More About Walden
C. G. (Sonny) Walden, III is an active conductor and award-winning composer. His composition “Hope” was recently performed in front of the painting by the same name at the Watts Gallery in Compton, Surrey, UK as a part of the bicentennial celebration of artist George Watts. “Hope” was also chosen for a “Concert of Hope and Resilience” in commemoration of the fifth anniversary of the bombing of the Boston Marathon by the new music group Juventas. His setting of biblical text “Set me as a Seal” won the Cincinnati Camerata 2016 composition prize.
His setting of Walt Whitman’s “Come up from the Fields” was recently recorded by Chorosynthesis and released on Centaur recordings and featured in concerts titled “Empowering Silenced Voices.
He is presently completing “A Requiem of Hope” commissioned by The Prentice Chorale in Tuscaloosa, Alabama commissioned in celebration of the 50th year of their founding.
His arrangement of “God of Grace” was named Best Arrangement of 1996 by the Composer’s Guild. He has also won the Texas Music Educators Association Composition Prize, The Arnold Salop Memorial Composition Prize, and was the first runner up in the Texas Choral Directors composition contest. His graduate work in composition was done while on Fellowship at the University of North Texas and his teachers included Martin Mailman, Larry Austin, and Merrill Ellis. He taught music composition at Georgia Southern University and served as an ordained Minister of Music at Dunwoody United Methodist Church.
Rev. Walden has been a member of the Robert Shaw Festival Chorus at Carnegie Hall and was a frequent tenor soloist with the former Savannah Symphony. Choirs under Mr. Walden’s direction have appeared at Georgia ACDA and on Georgia Public Radio as well as many regional and national and international church events.
Rev. Walden has been a member of the Robert Shaw Festival Chorus at Carnegie Hall and was a frequent tenor soloist with the former Savannah Symphony. Choirs under Mr. Walden’s direction have appeared at Georgia ACDA and on Georgia Public Radio as well as many regional and national and international church events.
His music has been published by Walden3Music, LudwigMasters Publishing, Kalmus, Abingdon Press and Hoyt Editions and is frequently performed in universities, churches, concert halls and schools throughout the United States. Reviews of his compositions have called them “profound and sensitive” “modern-but-accessible” and “accessible but not common.”