About

Elizabeth Skola Davis is a cellist and composer. She's principal cellist and composer in residence of the Trinity Chamber Orchestra in Maryland, and she teaches cello at Kentlands School of Music and Victor Litz Music Center.

She grew up moving often before her family settled in southern Indiana. She studied voice with her mother, began piano and organ at nine, and took up the cello at thirteen after two years as piano accompanist for her junior high school string orchestra. She earned a Bachelor of Music in cello performance at the University of Evansville.

During her master's studies at Louisiana State University she moved from performance to music theory and then to composition, studying with Dinos Constantinides. Her Oriana's Lament for soprano and chamber orchestra won third prize in the 1989 ASCAP Victor Herbert Young Composers competition in the Voice with Orchestra category. Two years later her Trio for Clarinet, Cello and Piano was one of seven works given an honorable mention in the Small Ensemble category, and it was featured at the Second Festival of Women Composers in Indiana, Pennsylvania.

She played for 17 years in the Evansville Philharmonic and the Baton Rouge Symphony. She has also played with the Austin Symphony, the Austin Civic Orchestra, the Acadiana Symphony, the Louisiana Sinfonietta, Mission Chamber Orchestra, Mission City Opera and Natchez Opera, and she was principal cellist of the Palo Alto Philharmonic and the Columbia Orchestra in Columbia, Maryland.

She writes in a Neo-Romantic style for a wide variety of ensembles including full and chamber orchestra, British brass band, brass and woodwind quintets, string quartet, choir, solo voice, and solo instruments, including exotic instruments like carillon and taishogoto. Her arrangements of other people's music, mostly for strings, are published through ArrangeMe, a Hal Leonard Company.