Suzanne Ciani was born in an Army hospital in Indiana. The third of six children, she grew up in Quincy, Massachusetts with her four sisters and brother. Her father was an orthopedic surgeon who practiced in Quincy and Boston, and her mother was a homemaker who loved to sew, make quilts, and braid rugs. Suzanne’s brother was a drummer, but died about fifteen years ago. Her sisters have chosen some of the non-musical arts - one is a professional artist in Texas (and has done some of the artwork on Suzanne’s album covers), one is an architect, one is an attorney who lives in Marin County, and one is a student of computer technology.
In 1992, Suzanne was diagnosed with breast cancer - a tragic event that became a major turning point in her life. After surgery and radiation treatments, the cancer went into remission, but Suzanne knew she needed a change. She had planned to rent a house in Bolinas, CA for a year and then move to Italy in 1993, but she met her husband, entertainment attorney Joe Anderson, who was also renting the house off and on, and Bolinas has been her homebase ever since. Suzanne and Joe were married in 1994 on the Isle of Capri in Italy, the day after Suzanne finished recording her "Dream Suite" album. A crowd danced the couple through the walled streets of the city accompanied by twenty musicians in 18th century costumes. Suzanne rode a donkey through town who was also in costume! She calls the day “a dream come true, and an absolute fairy tale.” (Suzanne and Joe were divorced in 2000.)
Living so close to nature the past several years has been a different kind of inspiration for Suzanne and her music. She used to travel to different parts of the world to do her composing, but now feels quite content to stay at home and soak up all the wonders that living at the top of a cliff overlooking the ocean has to offer.
Suzanne’s fascination with music started when she was seven when her mother brought home a box of classical music albums from a nearby fire sale. Suzanne started piano lessons in the third grade, and this is also when she started to compose music. One of her sisters was taking piano lessons, and Suzanne wanted to play so much that she taught herself to read music. She played day and night, and, after one year of lessons, she was already playing Rachmaninoff. Her teacher said that there was nothing else he could teach her, so she continued to study on her own until high school, playing mostly classical music. As a child, Suzanne also tried playing guitar, recorder, Indian flute, and cello, but says she was hopeless at most of these. She also dreamed of becoming a ballerina, but had to give that up because of “flat feet.” At the age of seven, she knew her life would be about music, although she wasn’t confident about being able to make a living at it. She actually came close to going to law school.
In her junior year of high school, Suzanne auditioned for a music program, and one of the judges asked if she could play a C-scale. She could play Rachmaninoff, but didn’t know the scales, so she made the decision to study music theory and structure. She was a music major at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, graduating with honors in 1968. She earned a Masters Degree in Music Composition from UC Berkeley in 1970. It was while she was in graduate school that Suzanne began making a living in music. First, she went on the road with a rock theater group, and then she started composing and recording electronic music for television advertisements. While she was in California, Suzanne studied with some of the early pioneers of electronic music, including Don Buchla, whose synthesizers carry his name. Suzanne was one of the first people to do
