Donald Betts made his New York debut at the age of twenty-one playing his own music alongside works by Prokofiev, Liszt and Schumann, which prompted Musical America to cite his “tremendous technique and bravura style” and the New York Times to note him as “a pianist of imagination and poetic feeling.” Soon after, he won the Concert Artist Guild Award and presented two more New York recitals at Town Hall and Carnegie Recital Hall. While doing graduate work at Indiana University School of Music, he was the only piano student given his own studio and a roster of music majors to teach; as a professor at Macalester College, he co-founded The Macalester Trio with violinist Joseph Roche. Eventually, with cellist Camilla Heller, the trio performed virtually the entire traditional repertoire of piano trios and piano quartets, commissioned new works and brought to light several forgotten works from the past. Their recording of CHAMBER WORKS by Women Composers was hailed by Newsweek in 1980 as one of ten of the most important recordings of that year.

Betts is a composer of over a hundred compositions; most recently, his music was performed in Dublin, Ireland and Puebla San Miguel Allerde, Mexico, and his works have also been performed in The Conservatory of Music in Siberia and in Sarajevo, in concerts in New York City, Chicago, Washington, DC, Pittsburgh, Tallahasse, and various colleges and universities in the Midwest and the East. He has recorded for Vox, Centaur, CRI, Crest, Ampira, and Inscape. A recent recording for the Centaur label (SOUNDINGS) was highly recommended by The American Record Guide as “seductively dreamlike and sensuous, filled with mystery and rapture.” Henry Brant has said of his piano music, “Donald Betts’ proven abilities and long experience as a soloist enable him as a composer to speak the piano’s language with a natural expressiveness and intensity and to develop the instrument’s idioms imaginatively along 20th century lines....In my view these compositions occupy a place of their own in the repertory of 20th century keyboard music.” He is presently a professor emeritus at Macalester College.