Michael Mauldin is a conductor, teacher, and composer who's music often portrays the power and fascination of his adopted state of New Mexico's natural rugged beauty and long vanished cultures, including the Anasazi. Since moving to New Mexico in 1971 and receiving his Master of Music degree in composition in 1974 from the University of New Mexico, he has written a large body of works for orchestra, chamber, choral and small instrumental groups, many commissioned and recorded.

He has written pieces for the Albuquerque Children's Choir, Albuquerque Philharmonic Orchestra, Albuquerque Youth Symphony, Albuquerque Junior Symphony, the choir of First Presbyterian Church in Albuquerque, Serenata de Santa Fe, the Albuquerque Boy Choir, New Mexico Brass Quintet, New Mexico Woodwind Quintet, Santa Fe Women's Ensemble, the Santa Fe Trio, the Olympian Brass of the National Repertory Orchestra, the UNM Percussion Ensemble and others.

From early on, he has won praise and honors for his compositions and also as a teacher. In 1982, Yoshimi Takeda, conductor at that time of the New Mexico Symphony Orchestra, commissioned Mauldin to write "Fajada Butte: An Epiphany", a symphonic movement inspired by the discovery of an ingenious sun-shrine and solstice-marker on top of Fajada Butte, in Chaco Canyon. In 1985, the piece was performed by the National Repertory Orchestra, under Carl Topilow, for the Twentieth-Anniversary Celebration of the National Endowment for the Arts at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

Mauldin has guest-conducted various student and community orchestras, and in January, 2000, he conducted the New Mexico Symphony Orchestra in recording sessions to prepare five of his orchestral compositions for the CD, "Enchanted Land." He guest conducts and serves as clinician for children's and youth choirs and orchestras, and on the subject of student composition.

As a private teacher, public speaker, clinician, composer and performer, he actively promotes private and public arts-education throughout the country. He is also an outspoken advocate for the rights of children, holding that discipline is more than repression, and that society is repaid when children and young people are treated with respect, participating in important decisions regarding their own minds, bodies and spirits.