Composer

Laurel Buchart Sanders (ASCAP) is an American composer, conductor, performer and arts administrator with more than 40 years of experience. She has composed and arranged sacred and secular music for vocal ensembles, children’s choirs, and instrumental music for winds, brass, and mixed ensembles. Her compositions range from sacred songs and settings of traditional hymn tunes to lively and imaginative instrumental arrangements of well-known classics like The Charleston and once-popular public domain songs such as That Railroad Rag.

Educated as a singer with a master’s degree in arts administration and additional studies in music history, composition, and flute, Laurel creates, manages, and directs arts programs for people of all ages. Laurel began composing and arranging music while living and working in Germany. While there, she performed with the opera in Bonn, then taught early childhood music and language programs at German preschools and kindergartens for nearly a decade. She directed ecumenical choirs, intergenerational musicals, and children’s and youth choirs, helping people of all abilities to express themselves through music.

Directing choral ensembles gives her great joy, including the annual Lenten Ecumenical Choir she founded in 2012 and a new seasonal chamber ensemble, Celestial Sounds. The ecumenical choir sang in 2024 in Carnegie Hall after Laurel conducted the choir singing Requiem by Michael John Trotta in State College, Pennsylvania. In summer 2026 the ecumenical choir will perform in Lucca, Italy under her baton as well as singing in Rome. Laurel performs regularly as a flutist in Raystown Wind Orchestra, The Fair Winds III, and The Whistle Tones flute quartet. Her recent compositions focus on sacred and secular music for small instrumental ensembles (woodwinds, mixed ensembles and brass). She also wrote the lyrics for the anthem Our Hope in You is Strong (Trotta), a poetic translation from an early Pennsylvania German hymn text for SATB choir, organ and optional flute, which was published in 2025.

Laurel has authored articles for the Choristers Guild and the Association of Lutheran Church Musicians, of which she is a member. She is the Director of Music and Arts Ministries at Grace Lutheran Church in State College, Pennsylvania, where she has served since 2010.