Madeleine Ertel

Madeleine Ertel (she/her) is a composer, trumpeter, and arranger known for her honest and melodic approach to music making. On top of studying composition privately with Alexander Rapoport, she holds a Bachelor of Music in Jazz Performance from the University of Toronto (2020) and a Masters of Jazz Arrangement-Composition from the Jazz-Institut Berlin (2025). In 2022 and 2023, Madeleine was selected as a finalist for the Toronto Arts Foundation’s Emerging Jazz Artist Award.

In 2018, Madeleine took part in the Casalmaggiore International Music Festival under the direction of David Braid and was selected to attend the Engelsholm Jazz Workshop in Denmark in 2020. In November 2021 she was accepted into the Banff Musicians in Residence program for Jazz & Creative Music to explore her innovative ideas about contemporary contrapuntal writing. Her pieces have been performed by the Okanagan Symphony Youth Orchestra, the University of Toronto 12tet, the Big Bang! Ensemble as part of the Women from Space Festival (2024, 2025), and the TILT Composers’ Collective. In 2023, she founded “Shoebox Composer’s Concerts”, a DIY concert series focused on creating more opportunities for emerging composers to hear their works performed in a live concert environment.

As a composer, Madeleine is concerned with bridging her experience as a performer of Black American Music forms (jazz and improvised music) with her training in European classical music, prioritizing rhythmic complexity, contrapuntal textures, and audience engagement in her work.