Violinist Sarah Cranor is passionate about the vibrant sonic possibilities found in sharing both historical and contemporary music with live audiences.

Sarah’s ongoing collaborations include Chaski Quartet, whose summer tours focus on bringing diverse string quartet music to incarcerated individuals in multiple Colorado Department of Corrections facilities, as well as public concerts across Colorado and New Mexico.  Sarah can be heard in performances with the Indianapolis Baroque Orchestra, Sphere Ensemble, Omaha Symphony, and with Duo Anthracite, with performances in Colorado, Indiana, and Bogotá, Colombia, with a mix of repertoire for two treble instruments from Jean-Marie Leclair to Sven-David Sandström.  Sarah served as acting Concertmaster / Principal Second Violin with the West Texas Symphony for four seasons, was a member of the Permian Basin String Quartet, and guest concertmaster of the Bloomington and Lafayette Symphony Orchestras and the Bach Series at Duke University.   Sarah is the director of the Bloomington Early Music Immersion (BEMI), a unique, immersive middle-school-aged historical performance experience offered to modern string players without tuition cost, through the Bloomington Early Music Festival.

She directs Tonos del Sur: a historically-informed ensemble which explores the intersection of European music with the colonization of the Americas, whose aim is to bring music of lesser-known, anonymous, and indigenous composers, and music in indigenous languages to today’s audiences.  Tonos recently presented a program centered around modern premieres of Chilean villancicos from the Catedral Metropolitana archive in Santiago, Chile, heard for the first time since the 1780s, in collaboration with scholar Paul Feller, at the University of Illinois Chicago’s Latin American Music Festival, and in the greater Midwest area.  Other recent collaborations include “Music from New Spanish Convents”, giving the modern premiere of twelve villancicos from the Sanchez Garza repertory in Mexico City, out of some 400 liturgical manuscripts played by Santisima Trinidad Convent nuns in Puebla, Mexico, and concerts featuring music from across Latin America, especially programs centered around local depictions of the Virgin Mary, and of the music of Santiago Billoni, in the Bloomington and Berkeley Early Music Festivals and across the Midwest.

Sarah’s recordings include “The Colorful Telemann” with Indianapolis Baroque Orchestra for NAXOS Music, “Fair and Princely Branches: Music for the Jacobean Princes” with Renaissance violin band The Queen’s Rebels, “Stay at Home for the Holidays” with Sphere Ensemble, and the world premiere of Kurt Vonnegut’s Requiem with Voces Novae, found on all major streaming platforms.

Sarah holds a Doctor of Music degree from Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music; her doctoral research focuses on the music of Santiago Billoni, chapelmaster at the Durango Cathedral, Mexico, from 1749-1756.  While at IU, she studied with Stanley Ritchie, Grigory Kalinovsky, and Mimi Zweig.  She holds two Master of Music degrees from the University of Colorado at Boulder, where she studied with violinists Charles Wetherbee, Lina Bahn, and harpsichord and historical performance specialist Elizabeth Farr.  Sarah has presented guest lectures at EAFIT in Medellín, Colombia, the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and at Indiana University, and she teaches violin students both locally and across the world, including in Colombia and at Kabarak University in Kenya.  She performs regularly with her husband, violinist Alejandro Gómez Guillén both in string quartets and as Duo Anthracite.

Sarah is an ultra-marathon runner and always looks forward to seeing where her running shoes take her!