With all the talk one hears around Sedona about the power of the scenery, it is appropriate that Sedona composer-in-residence Christel Veraart finds that her music is informed primarily by the landscapes that surround her.

Born in the Netherlands, Veraart trained in piano at Conservatory Maastricht and later at the Conservatorio Nacional Carlos Lopez Buchardo in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She then studied singing at Trinity College London — “My training was mostly in oratorio and then art songs,” Veraart said — and orchestration at the Berklee School of Music in Boston. Her credits as a composer and performer include 10 albums as well as dance and film music.

“I think it was a very organic transition,” Veraart explained. “I studied piano when I was in Argentina and I have traveled the globe ever since. And piano, as you can imagine, is not the most practical instrument to travel with. So it was always very difficult to find an instrument to study, and that was a complication. So I thought at the time the solution was to become a singer, because then you have your instrument with you. Of course, that never really happened, because I still needed that piano to accompany myself. Singing became an addition. An expansion of what I was already doing. And composing was actually something that I think I did as a kid. That’s how I started out in the first place.”

For Veraart, composition is intimately linked to geography.

“Composing became a way to give expression to all the places that I’ve traveled to,” Veraart elaborated. “That first album of original compositions [‘Inner Landscapes’] was in the landscapes. And that was based on poems that I wrote back in Europe … The second album I wrote was done in Alaska when I lived there. I was so floored by the beautiful landscapes that I just heard the sounds that went with it. Then the next one was also in Alaska, ‘Arctic Aquarelle,’ which was an experimental piano meditation. I just wanted to record straight out of bed without having a cup of coffee, just recording it straight from the heart. Then we went to Indonesia, and there was ‘Lotus Dreams’ … and then the ‘Pleiades’ was written. That was the first album that I wrote when I came to Sedona, influenced by the stars.”

“I remember that I flew over the North Pole to go to Europe for the first time and people had told me to make sure that you look outside because it’s so beautiful,” Veraart continued to reminisce. “I looked outside and I watched this beautiful snowy landscape. And as I looked and listened, I heard out of nowhere the duduk, which is an instrument that has absolutely nothing to do with that landscape.”

The duduk, a double-reed woodwind that is the national instrument of Armenia, is the earliest form of oboe. It can be heard in the introductory movement of Veraart’s “Polar Suite,” producing a sound that listeners may more readily associate with Turkish music.

“Out of this loneliness, to me, the duduk speaks to that,” Veraart said. “It has ended up being becoming my signature instrument in a lot of my compositions from then on. You’ll find it back in ‘Lotus Dreams,’ where it also has no business being, in Asian music, and I have used it now in a new album that I’m that I’m finishing up that is inspired by Argentina. So it keeps coming up everywhere.”

She also favors the use of piano and cello in her works, and plays the piano on her own recordings, as well as supplying the vocal parts.

“Everything you hear is mine,” Veraart said. “Nobody is ever hired.”

“In general, I dream about them,” Veraart said of her compositions. “They are born at the grand piano, when I sit down and I just start playing something and it’s a theme I won’t be able to get out of my head and it keeps playing back in my mind. Then I’ll take it to the computer. And then it’s almost a process of painting every line and let it sit a little bit, walk away from it and come back to earth.”

Learning to work with a computer program, she said, rather than dealing with music acoustically, was one challenge she faced in taking up composition. Her background as an instrumentalist also required some adjustment.

“When I first started out, I wanted to write down everything because I was used to working with a score, as the interpreter of course, and for me to improvise was something that was completely foreign to me,” Veraart said. “Sometimes I find it now easier to play straight away. Because if there’s no interference, you can’t analyze it. It’s just come straight from the heart.”

Her film credits include “Dreaming of Whales,” which premiered at the Illuminate Film Festival in Sedona in 2021, “The Return of the Salmon,” a short documentary dealing with salmon migration, and “Merope,” a collaboration with Sedona Ballet and founder Winne Muench that features a selection from her upcoming album “Nostalgia.”

“The music is so visual and also very rich,” Veraart said. “It’s very suitable for dance. And she heard that, too, from the get-go.

“We joined forces because we work really well together and we would like to create a platform that combines all the arts, not just music, but also music, visuals, you name it, everything that you could possibly think of that has an artistic value. We would like to combine those things because we believe that that all of them together, make a very powerful statement. I think they can enrich each other. So that’s what we’re working on … The first phase of that Reflections Festival that wants to combine all the arts resulted in the short film ‘Merope.’”

“Merope,” which recently won best dance film at the Cannes World Film Festival, is an allegorical portrayal of the seven sisters of Greek myth who comprise the Pleiades.

Different and diverse projects, Veraart said, “feed off each other and they don’t feel like different things to me.” On the other hand, she rarely composes for individual artists.

“I don’t usually do that because I have so much inspiration that it’s hard for me to break with that,” she said.

She is currently working on completing the “Nostalgia” album and its accompanying book, “Santa Fe and Esmeralda.”

“During COVID, when the world was in shadows and darkness, all of the sudden, out of the blue, I heard a tango,” Veraart said. “Argentina has been very, very important to me all throughout my career and has influenced me tremendously … but I didn’t expect it to revisit me at that point in my life. I followed that lead and before I knew it, I had a whole album, written with music, inspired by Argentina.”

“Somewhere around there, I sat down again and then there was a whole story that revisited me that I had written in Dutch, which is my native language, and that I had never done anything with, and somebody encouraged me to rewrite it in English,” she said. “I’m now in the process of finishing that book, and when I was in the process of finishing the book, I was narrating and making an audio version of it. And that’s where I’m at right now. I realized that the music and the book, they really belong together.”

Another of her projects is a forthcoming album of sacred arias, including Johann Sebastian Bach’s “Ave Maria” and Franz Joseph Haydn’s “Fac me vere tecum flere.” Veraart said that she is aiming “to give it my own twist, following the scores of course.”

“I’ve lived all over the place,” Veraart said of her journey to Sedona. “When my husband and I left Alaska in 2016, we toured the country, mostly the West Coast, in a travel trailer for three years … So we had a short list and on that short list was Sedona, a little bit also because my husband’s parents were aging and they were living in Phoenix, and that was one reason. The other reason was Sedona is not your typical kind of village. It has a very artistic vibe, which of course I gravitated toward … We went to Indonesia first and Australia, and then it was time to find a spot to settle down, at least for a while.”

Understandably for an avid traveler, Veraart speaks Dutch, English, Spanish and German, as well as some Portuguese and French.

“It’s also really being Dutch,” Veraart said of her linguistic abilities. “We’re such a small country and what are you going to do? Nobody’s going to learn Dutch. So we have to do something. It’s not unusual to speak multiple languages in Europe.”

Veraart faced a different sort of linguistic challenge when composing the lullaby “Viglid” for the play “The Child Behind the Eyes.”

“Back in Alaska, I was approached by a director,” Veraart laughed, remembering. “She was going to direct a monologue called ‘The Child Behind the Eyes,’ and it was written by Nava Semel, a Jewish playwright, very famous playwright. So she asked me if I could score that play. It’s something I had never done until that time.

“So I read the monologue, and when I read it, I heard it,” she said. “I wrote, at first, instrumental music, which is the song, but it wasn’t the song. Then I met with the actor and production company and the director and they wanted some words. If I can, I try to do everything myself. Not because I don’t enjoy collaborations, but because it is easier, copyrightwise, to do it that way.

“So I said to the actor, ‘Well, let me have a hand in it.’ I thought to myself, you know, Yiddish, I must be able to do this because Yiddish is close to Dutch and it’s very close to German and I speak both. And how difficult can it be? A little bit crazy, of course … It doesn’t really say much more than ‘sleep, my darling, sleep, my child.’

“So I wrote that and I sent it to the playwright in Israel, who sent me a very lovely note that she really enjoyed the music. But then she set me straight that ‘we don’t speak Yiddish anymore.’”

“I couldn’t do Hebrew because, really, I can’t even read it,” Veraart said. “Of course, I didn’t know how to pronounce Yiddish. So I had to run to the rabbi next door, saying, ‘Can you please help me?’ and fortunately his wife spoke Yiddish. It became a whole thing. Then the Israeli playwright became involved and she offered to write an adaptation in Hebrew. And Hebrew — I really don’t know how to read this. So I ran back to the to the synagogue to find the rabbi: ‘Does anybody speak Hebrew?’ So that song exists also in Hebrew. I didn’t release it, but it exists in Hebrew … It was great fun and I learned a lot with it.”

“People all over the planet, they have given me such gifts and inspiration,” Veraart said. “They’re just like a whole big pile of gifts that came my way, which I think is just beautiful.”