Alejandro Rutty Residency

Alejandro Rutty’s compositional output includes orchestral, chamber and mixed-media music, arrangements of Argentine traditional music, and innovative outreach musical projects.

A unique feature of Rutty’s music is its affection for textures suggested by modern recording processing techniques, and the use of Tango - a genre he performs as a pianist-and other South American genres as part of the music’s surface.

Rutty’s compositions and arrangements have been played by the Minnesota Symphony Orchestra, Boston Modern Orchestra Project, Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra, National Symphony Orchestra of Argentina, National Symphony Orchestra of Brazil, Porto Alegre Symphony Orchestra, New Mexico Symphony Orchestra, Linköping Symphony Orchestra, American Modern Ensemble, the New York New Music Ensemble, the Red Clay Saxophone Quartet, and the Cassatt String Quartet among other groups. Rutty’s music has been published by Effiny Music, SCI/European American Music, and Ricordi Sudamericana.

Recordings of his music have been released by Navona Records, Capstone Records, Arizona University Recordings, and ERM Media, PAI Records. 

Alejandro Rutty (PhD SUNY Buffalo) is currently Associate Professor of Music Composition at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

June in Buffalo 2022 Senior Composer: David Liptak

We are pleased to welcome David Liptak as one of the senior composers at the 2022 edition of June in Buffalo! 

David Liptak's music has been described as “luminous and arresting,” “richly atmospheric,” and having “transparent textures, incisive rhythms, shimmering lightness.” His compositions have been performed throughout the United States and abroad by the San Francisco Symphony, the Montreal Symphony, the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, the Group for Contemporary Music, EARPLAY, the Ying, Cassatt, and JACK String Quartets, the Dinosaur Annex Ensemble, the New York New Music Ensemble, the 20th-Century Consort, baritone William Sharp, soprano Tony Arnold, and by many other soloists and ensembles. 

In 1995 David Liptak was awarded the Elise L. Stoeger Prize, given by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center in recognition of distinguished achievement in the field of chamber music composition. He has received awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Barlow Endowment for Music Composition, both in 2002; he has also received the 2006 Lillian Fairchild Award; and commissions for new music have included those supported by the Fromm Foundation, the Koussevitzky Music Foundation, Meet the Composer, the Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust, the California Music Center, and the Hanson Institute for American Music.  Recordings of David Liptak’s music can be found on Bridge, Innova, Albany, Centaur, and other recording labels. 

He is President of the American Composers Alliance, and his music is published by several publishers, including Keiser Classical, Alfred Music - Donald Hunsberger Wind Ensemble Library, and the American Composers Edition. Much of his music written very recently has explored the poetry and magical quality of stars and starlight, imagined and real.  A dedicated teacher of composition students for the past three decades, David Liptak is Professor of Composition at the Eastman School of Music, where he has taught since 1986.

 Full Biography

 

June in Buffalo 2022 Senior Composer: David Felder

We are pleased to welcome David Felder as one of the senior composers at the 2022 edition of June in Buffalo!

David Felder has long been recognized as a leader in his generation of American composers. His works have been featured at many of the leading international festivals for contemporary music, and earn continuing recognition through performance and commissioning programs. Felder's work has been broadly characterized by its highly energetic profile, through its frequent employment of technological extension and elaboration of musical materials (including his Crossfire video series, and the video/music collaboration Shamayim), and its lyrical qualities.

Felder has received numerous grants and commissions including many composer's awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, two New York State Council commissions, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, Guggenheim, two Koussevitzky commissions, two Fromm Foundation Fellowships, two awards from the Rockefeller Foundation, Meet the Composer "New Residencies" (1993-1996), composer residency with the Buffalo Philharmonic, two commissions from the Mary Flagler Cary Trust, and many more.

In May 2010, he received the Music Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a career recognition award. Shamayim was awarded a Silver Medal in Music from the Park City Film Festival in Spring, 2011.

Felder serves as Birge-Cary Chair in Composition at SUNY Buffalo, and has been Artistic Director of the "June in Buffalo" Festival since 1985, when he revived it upon his arrival in Buffalo. Since 2006, he has been Director of the Robert and Carol Morris Center for 21st Century Music at the University. From 1992 to 1996 he was Meet the Composer "New Residencies," Composer-in-Residence to the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra and WBFO-FM. In 1996, he formed the professional chamber orchestra, the Slee Sinfonietta, and has been Artistic Director since that time. In 2008, he was named SUNY Distinguished Professor, the highest rank in the entirety of the SUNY system. In 2015 he was named Co-Director of the University at Buffalo's Creative Arts Initiative, a plan to bring major international creative artists to the region as guest artists.

Felder recently released a CD on Coviello Contemporary featuring Jeu de Tarot (2016-2017), a chamber concerto recorded by Irvine Arditti and Ensemble Signal, and conducted by Brad Lubman. The disc also features his string quartet Netivot (2016), recorded by the Arditti Quartet, and Another Face (1987), recorded by Irvine Arditti. His recent orchestra piece, Die Dämmerungen, commissioned by the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, will receive its complete world premiere at Kleinhans Music Hall on October 5^th and 6th, 2019, under the baton of JoAnn Falletta.

A dedicated teacher and mentor, he has served as Ph.D. dissertation advisor and major professor for over eighty composers at Buffalo, many of whom are actively teaching, composing and performing internationally at leading institutions. Nearly 900 'emerging' composers have participated in June in Buffalo, the festival Felder pioneered and dedicated to younger composers upon his arrival in Buffalo in 1985. Felder served as Master Artist in Residence at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in February-March, 2010. His works are published by Theodore Presser, and Project Schott New York, and portrait recordings are available on Albany, Bridge, Coviello, BMOP/sound, Mode, and EMF. Two recording projects were recently completed, both of Les Quatres Temps Cardinaux in surround sound, with one being released on BMOP/sound, and the other on Coviello Contemporary.

 

June in Buffalo 2022 Senior Composer: Kevin Ernste

We are pleased to welcome Kevin Ernste as one of the senior composers at the 2022 edition of June in Buffalo!

Kevin Ernste is a composer, performer, and teacher of composition and electronic music at Cornell University where he is Director of the Cornell Electroacoustic Music Center (CEMC). He did graduate work in Music Composition at the Eastman School of Music (MA, PhD). He is a founding member of the Cornell Avant-Garde Ensemble (CAGE, http://digital.music.cornell.edu/cage/). He was the Acting Director of the Eastman Computer Music Center and Co-director of the ImageMovementSound festival. 

His recent music includes Nisi [nee-see] (“Island” in Greek) for hornist Adam Unsworth released on Equilibrium Records,  Numina for Brooklyn-based Janus Trio (flute, viola, harp) presented recently at the Spark Festival in MN, Seiend for brass quintet premiered by Ensemble Paris Lodron(Salzburg, Austria, Roses Don’t Need Perfume for guitarist Kenneth Meyer (gtr. and electronic sounds, 2009) recently presented by Dr. Meyer on a Hungary/Romania tour, a piece for saxophone and electronics called To Be Neither Proud Nor Ashamed (released on Innova Records), and Birches for viola with electronic sounds for John Graham performed on Mr. Graham’s recent China tour (Beijing, Wuhan, Xiamen, Hong Kong) as well as at the Aspen Summer Music Festival.  Mr, Graham presented Birches again in August 2011 at the International Computer Music Conference  (ICMC) in Huddersfield, UK.

Ernste’s recently commissioned works include Chorale for chamber ensemble and electronics (after Stucky on Purcell), Palimpsest for the JACK Quartet,  and a half-evening-length work in progress for viola, percussion, and “unmanned” prepared piano.

Links of interest:

Cornell Electroacoustic Music Center (CEMC)
Cornell Avant-Garde Ensemble (CAGE)

June in Buffalo 2022 Senior Composer: Chen Yi

We are pleased to welcome Chen Yi as one of the senior composers at the 2022 edition of June in Buffalo!

Born in Guangzhou, China, Dr. CHEN YI* transcends musical and cultural boundaries in her blending of Chinese and Western traditions. She holds a BA and an MA in Composition from the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing and a DMA from Columbia University, and has studied composition with Wu Zuqiang, Chou Wen-chung and Mario Davidovsky. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2005 and the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2019. She has taught at the Peabody Conservatory and currently holds a professorship at the University of Missouri Kansas City, where she has been on faculty since 1998.

Dr. Chen’s music has been performed and commissioned by the world’s leading musicians and ensembles, including Yehudi Menuhin, Yo-Yo Ma, Evelyn Glennie, the Cleveland Orchestra, the BBC and Singapore Symphony Orchestras, the Seattle, Pacific, and Kansas City Symphonies, the Brooklyn, NY, and LA Philharmonics, Sächsische Staatskapelle Dresden, and the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra. Her music has also been recorded on many labels based in the US, Europe, and Asia, including Naxos, Albany, Teldec, and the China Record Company, among others.

Chen has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, the Lieberson Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Charles Ives Living Prize, First Prize in the Chinese National Composition Contest, The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center's Stoeger Prize, the Lili Boulanger Memorial Fund Award, the Herb Alpert Award, the Eddie Medora King Award, and the Nissim Prize.

Some of Chen’s recent premieres include Four Spirits for Piano and Orchestra, commissioned by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Pearl River Overture, commissioned by the Guangzhou Symphony Orchestra, Southern Scenes for Flute, Pipa, and Orchestra by the Hawaii Symphony Orchestra, Totem Poles for Solo Organ, commissioned by the American Guild of Organists, and Happy Tune for Violin and Viola, commissioned and premiered at the Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival 25th anniversary concert. Other premieres include Fire for 12 Players, commissioned by the Chicago Center for Contemporary Music, Introduction, Andante, and Allegro by the Seattle Symphony Orchestra, Plum Blossom, which debuted at the Fifth Hong Kong International Piano Competition, Bamboo Song for Solo Piano at the China National Center for Performing Arts, and Elegy for Oboe by members of the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra in Minnesota.

A strong advocate for new music, American composers, Asian composers, and women in music, Chen Yi has served on the advisory or educational board of the Fromm Foundation, the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Chamber Music America, Meet The Composer, the American Music Center, New Music USA, the American Composers Orchestra, the League of Composers/ISCM, the International Alliance of Women in Music, and the Women’s Philharmonic Advocacy. She has supported many composers, conductors, musicians (including dozens of excellent performers on Chinese traditional instruments), educators, and students through her tireless work over the past three decades.

Prof. Chen was appointed to a Cheung Kong Scholar Visiting Professorship at the Central Conservatory in Beijing by China’s Ministry of Education in 2006, where she established the first Beijing International Composition Workshop, and later to a Distinguished Visiting Professorship at the Tianjin Conservatory.  Through her academic positions, lectures, workshops, residences with arts organizations, and collegiate and pre-collegiate institutions throughout the United States and China, Dr. Chen has made significant contributions to the field of music education. Many of her students have been recognized around the world with national and international composition awards and professorships.

Dr. Chen is a cultural ambassador who has introduced hundreds of new compositions and a large number of musicians from the East and the West to music and educational exchange programs in the US, the UK, Germany, and Asian countries through programs including the Beijing Modern Music Festival, the Beijing International Composition Workshop, the Shanghai Spring Festival, the Tianjin May Festival, the China-ASEAN Music Festival, and the Thailand International Composition Festival. She believes that music is a universal language, improving understanding between peoples of different cultural backgrounds and helping to bring peace in the world.

* Chen is family name, Yi is personal name. Chen Yi can be referred to as Dr. Chen, Prof. Chen, Ms. Chen, or Chen Yi, but not Dr. Yi, Prof. Yi, or Ms. Yi.

June in Buffalo 2022 Senior Composer: Olivier Pasquet

We are pleased to welcome Olivier Pasquet as one of the senior composers at the 2022 edition of June in Buffalo!

Olivier Pasquet is a composer, music producer and visual artist. His work is based on the writing of audio visual compositions and synesthesia. His generative pieces are minimalistic and maximalistic at the same time and contextualized within rationalist theory-fictions. The latter can be deciphered through singular pieces or the overall artistic research. The formal and plastic value of his work provides strong links with geometry, architectural and algorithmic designs. His compositions can be sound-based, visual or material. Olivier Pasquet first practices music writing on his own. After composition studies in Cambridge with Richard Hoadley, lectures with Trevor Wishart and Iannis Xenakis, he works in several popular music studios and does a short visit at INA-GRM. 

He got his PhD in musical composition and non-standard architecture at Huddersfield University with Pierre Alexandre Tremblay. He orientates his work toward staged, contemporary music and media art. He collaborates with a wide variety of other artists mostly at IRCAM-Centre Pompidou for several decades. He confronts his sonic compositions with reality thru performance art; dance, opera, music and contemporary theatre. His pieces also materialize themselves under the form of plastic installations and purely electronic music. They are played, sometimes danced, in concert halls, galleries, clubs, or specific sites worldwide. 

Olivier Pasquet taught interactive arts and computational design at Ecole Nationale des Arts Décoratifs, theater-music at Théâtre National de Strasbourg etc. He also has been, or is, guest professor at the National Taiwan University of the Arts, the Hochschule der Künste Bern or NY Buffalo University. He has been a researcher at Tokyo University with Philippe Codognet, Keio and Buffalo with David Felder. He worked at Sony CSL and Ableton as a consultant. He received several prizes and residencies such as Villa Médicis, Tokyo Wonder Site, Arcadi, residencies both in Chili and Taiwan. He received the Creative Art Initiative for Frank Lloyd Wright and Toshiko Mori’s buildings in 2018, the FB price for “Momemtum of AI Creation” in 2021. Besides commissions, he is currently research associate at the Zurich University of the Arts’ Institute for Computer Music and part of the European Flucoma research project.

Olivier Pasquet's work can be found here.

June in Buffalo 2022 Resident Ensemble: Slee Sinfonietta

We are pleased to welcome the Slee Sinfonietta as one of the resident ensembles at the 2022 edition of June in Buffalo!

The Slee Sinfonietta is the professional chamber orchestra in residence at the University at Buffalo and the flagship ensemble of the Robert and Carol Morris Center for 21st-Century Music. The Sinfonietta presents a series of concerts each year that feature performances of challenging new works by contemporary composers and lesser-known works from the chamber orchestra repertoire.

Founded in 1997 by composer David Felder, and comprised of a core group including UB faculty performance artists, visiting artists, national and regional professionals and advanced performance students, the Slee Sinfonietta is conducted by leading conductors and composers. This ensemble has produced world-class performances of important repertoire for fourteen years, and its activities include touring, professionally produced recordings, and unique concert experiences for listeners of all levels of experience.

 

June in Buffalo 2022 Resident Ensemble: Ensemble Signal

We are pleased to welcome Ensemble Signal as one of the resident ensembles at the 2022 edition of June in Buffalo!

Ensemble Signal is a NY-based ensemble dedicated to offering the broadest possible audience access to a diverse range of contemporary works through performance, commissioning, recording, and education. Since its debut in 2008, Signal has performed over 350 concerts, premiered numerous works, and co-produced ten recordings.

Signal was founded by Co-Artistic/Executive Director Lauren Radnofsky and Co-Artistic Director/Conductor Brad Lubman. Described by the New York Times as "one of the most vital groups of its kind” and “A new-music ensemble that by this point practically guarantees quality performances,” Signal regularly performs with Lubman and features a supergroup of independent artists from the modern music scene. Lubman, one of the foremost conductors of modern music and a leading figure in the field for over two decades, is a frequent guest with the world’s most distinguished orchestras and new music ensembles.

The Ensemble has appeared at concert halls and international festivals including Lincoln Center Festival, the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Series at Walt Disney Concert Hall, BIG EARS Festival, Carnegie Hall's Zankel Hall, Lincoln Center American Songbook, The Library of Congress, Washington Performing Arts, Cal Performances, Tanglewood Music Festival of Contemporary Music, Ojai Music Festival, the Guggenheim Museum (NY), NPR Tiny Desk Concerts and the Bang on a Can Marathon. They regularly work directly with nearly all the composers they perform in order to offer the most authentic interpretations, a list that includes Hans Abrahamsen, Unsuk Chin, Michael Gordon, Georg Friedrich Haas, Oliver Knussen, Helmut Lachenmann, David Lang, Hilda Paredes, Steve Reich, Kaija Saariaho and Julia Wolfe.

Recent highlights include the world premiere and 130 performances of Reich’s Reich/Richter for large ensemble, with artwork and film by Gerhard Richter for the inaugural season of New York’s multi-arts venue, The Shed (spring 2019), and the US premieres of Reich’s Runner at venues across the US (2017-18). Upcoming highlights in 2022 include the US premieres of music by Luca Francesconi and George Lewis, the world premiere of a new work by Darian Donovan Thomas, a concert of music curated by Julia Wolfe at Carnegie Hall, as well as workshop performances with the next generation of composers.

Among Signal’s recordings are Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians, which was released in May 2015 on harmonia mundi and received a Diapason d’or and appeared on the Billboard Classical Crossover Charts. Additional recordings include a CD & DVD of music by Lachenmann, with the composer as soloist in “…Zwei Gefühle…” (Mode) and Gordon/Lang/Wolfe’s Shelter (Cantaloupe).

Signal’s passion for the diverse range of music being written today is a driving force behind their projects. The Ensemble’s repertoire ranges from minimalism or pop-influenced to the iconoclastic European avant-garde. Signal’s projects are carefully conceived through close collaboration with cooperating presenting organizations, composers, and artists. Signal is flexible in size and instrumentation - everything from solo to large ensemble and opera, including film or multimedia, in any possible combination - enabling it to meet the ever-changing demands on the 21st century performing ensemble.

June in Buffalo 2022 Resident Ensemble: Arditti Quartet

We are pleased to welcome the Arditti Quartet as one of the resident ensembles at the 2022 edition of June in Buffalo!

The Arditti Quartet enjoys a world-wide reputation for their spirited and technically refined interpretations of contemporary and earlier 20th century music. Many hundreds of string quartets and other chamber works have been written for the ensemble since its foundation by first violinist Irvine Arditti in 1974. Many of these works have left a permanent mark on 20th century repertoire and have given the Arditti Quartet a firm place in music history. World premieres of quartets by composers such as Abrahamsen, Ades, Andriessen, Aperghis, Birtwistle, Britten, Cage, Carter, Denisov, Dillon, Dufourt, Dusapin, Fedele, Ferneyhough, Francesconi, Gubaidulina, Guerrero, Harvey, Hosokawa, Kagel, Kurtag, Lachenmann, Ligeti, Maderna, Manoury, Nancarrow, Reynolds, Rihm, Scelsi, Sciarrino, Stockhausen and Xenakis and hundreds more show the wide range of music in the Arditti Quartet’s repertoire.

The ensemble believes that close collaboration with composers is vital to the process of interpreting modern music and therefore attempts to work with every composer it plays.
The players’ commitment to educational work is indicated by their masterclasses and workshops for young performers and composers all over the world.

The Arditti Quartet’s extensive discography now features over 200 CDs.

42 CD’s were released as part of the ensemble’s series on Naive Montaigne. This series set the trend, by presenting numerous contemporary composer features, recorded in their presence as well as the first digital recordings of the complete Second Viennese School’s chamber music for strings. The quartet has recorded for more than 20 other CD labels and together this CD collection is the most extensive available of quartet literature in the last 40 years. To name just a few, Berio, Cage, Carter, Lachenmann, Ligeti, Nono, Rihm, the complete chamber music of Xenakis and Stockhausen’s infamous Helicopter Quartet. Some of the most recent releases with the French company Aeon include profiles of Birtwistle, Gerhard, Ferneyhough Paredes and Dusapin, and with Winter and Winter Abrahamsen.

Over the past 30 years, the ensemble has received many prizes for its work. They have won the Deutsche Schallplatten Preis several times and the Gramophone Award for the best recording of contemporary music in 1999 (Elliott Carter) in 2002 (Harrison Birtwistle) and in 2018 (Pascal Dusapin). In 2004 they were awarded the ‘Coup de Coeur’ prize by the Academie Charles Cros in France for their exceptional contribution to the dissemination of contemporary music. The prestigious Ernst von Siemens Music Prize was awarded to them in 1999 for ‘lifetime achievement’ in music. They remain to this day, the only ensemble ever to receive it.

The complete archive of the Arditti quartet is housed in the Sacher Foundation in Basle, Switzerland.

June in Buffalo 2022 Resident Ensemble: Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra

We are pleased to welcome the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra (Facebook) as one of the resident ensembles at the 2022 edition of June in Buffalo!

The Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra  is a professional major symphony orchestra of artistic excellence that is integral to Buffalo-Niagara’s vitality through the presentation of live symphonic music and other musical events, which inspire, educate and entertain the broadest possible audiences within Buffalo-Niagara and beyond.

After the rise and fall of several forerunners, the BPO was founded in 1935, performing most often at the Elmwood Music Hall, which was located at Elmwood Ave. and Virginia St. and was demolished in 1938. During the Great Depression, the orchestra was initially supported by funds from the Works Progress Administration and the Emergency Relief Bureau. Over the decades, the orchestra has matured in stature under outstanding music directors including William Steinberg, Josef Krips, Lukas Foss, Michael Tilson Thomas, Julius Rudel, Semyon Bychkov, and Maximiano Valdes. Many distinguished guest performers have graced the orchestra’s stage, including Sergei Rachmaninoff, Isaac Stern, Aaron Copland, Van Cliburn, and Yo-Yo Ma. The Buffalo Philharmonic has issued more than 50 recordings in its history. It has toured abroad twice: a six-city European tour in 1988, and a four-city tour of Poland in 2018.

Since 1940, the orchestra’s permanent home has been Kleinhans Music Hall, a National Historic Landmark designed by Eliel and Eero Saarinen with an international reputation as one of the finest concert halls in the United States. Since its inception in 1935, the BPO has served as Buffalo’s cultural ambassador. JoAnn Falletta is the Music Director of the Grammy Award-winning orchestra, which presents more than 120 Classics, Pops, Rock, Kids and Youth concerts each year.

 

Steven Kazuo Takasugi Residency

Steven Kazuo Takasugi, born 1960 in Los Angeles, is a composer of electro-acoustic concert music. This involves the collecting and archiving of recorded, acoustic sound samples into large databases, each classifying thousands of individual, performed instances collected over decades of experimentation and research, mostly conducted in his private sound laboratory. These are then subjecting to computer-assisted, algorithmic composition, revised and adjusted until the resulting emergent sound phenomena, energies, and relationships reveal hidden meanings and contexts to the composer. Against this general project of fixed-media is the addition of live performers, described as an accompanying project: "When people return . . ." This relationship often creates a "strange doubling" playing off the "who is doing what?" inherent with simultaneous live and recorded media: a ventriloquism effect of sorts.


Takasugi received his doctoral in music composition at the University of California, San Diego. He is currently an Associate of the Harvard Music Department. He is a 2022 Creative Capital Awardee, 2017 Civitella Ranieri Fellow, the 2016 Riemen and Bakatel Fellow for Music at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and is the recipient of awards including a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, four Ernst von Siemens Foundation Commissions, and a Japan Foundation Artist Residency in Tokyo. His work has been performed extensively worldwide. Takasugi is also a renowned teacher of composition associated with masterclasses in New York City, Singapore, Stuttgart, Tel Aviv, Darmstadt, Bludenz, and Cambridge, Massachusetts. He has taught at the University of California, San Diego, Harvard University, California Institute for the Arts, and the Kunitachi College of Music in Tokyo. Takasugi is also an extensive essayist on music and was one of the founding editors of Search Journal for New Music and Culture. He has organized numerous discussion panels and fora on New Music including colloquia and conferences at Harvard Music and the Darmstadt Forum.

 

Christopher Trapani Residency

The American/Italian composer Christopher Trapani synthesizes disparate influences, weaving American and European stylistic strands into a personal aesthetic that defies easy classification.

Allusions to Delta Blues, Appalachian folk tunes, dance band foxtrots, shoegaze guitar effects, and Turkish makam can be heard alongside spectral swells and meandering canons. As in Christopher’s hometown of New Orleans, diverse traditions coexist and intermingle, swirled into a rich melting pot.

Consonance is a central preoccupation; microtonality and just intonation are often employed. Timbral explorations are also manifold, from experiments with a wide range of mutes and preparations to an unusual instrumentarium, with works that call for custom electric guitars, dulcimer, qanûn, stroh violin, and retuned autoharps. Several of Christopher’s compositions bear the mark of his training in literature, influenced by novelists and poets including Thomas Pynchon, Geoff Dyer, and C. P. Cavafy. Many recent works also incorporate an idiosyncratic use of electronics, expanding the possibilities of color, pitch, and timing beyond the acoustic realm.

Christopher Trapani was born in New Orleans, Louisiana in 1980. He holds a Bachelor’s degree from Harvard College, where he studied composition with Bernard Rands and poetry under Helen Vendler. He spent most of his twenties overseas: a year in London, working on a Master’s degree at the Royal College of Music with Julian Anderson; a year in Istanbul, studying microtonality in Ottoman music on a Fulbright grant; and seven years in Paris, where he studied with Philippe Leroux and worked at IRCAM. Starting in 2010, Christopher spent a decade in and out of New York City, where he completed a doctorate at Columbia University in 2017, studying with Tristan Murail, Georg Friedrich Haas, Fred Lerdahl, and George Lewis.

Christopher is the winner of the 2016-17 Luciano Berio Rome Prize, as well as the 2007 Gaudeamus Prize, the first American in over 30 years to win the international young composers’ award. Other honors include a Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2015), the Julius F. Ježek Prize (2013), three Morton Gould Young Composers Awards from ASCAP (2005, 2006, and the Leo Kaplan Award in 2009), and a BMI Student Composer Award (2006).

Recent commissions have come from the BBC, the JACK Quartet, Ensemble Modern, and Radio France, and his works have been heard at Carnegie Hall, the Venice Biennale, Southbank Centre, Ruhrtriennale, IRCAM, Ravenna Festival, and Wigmore Hall. In March 2011, Christopher was featured in a portrait concert on the Philharmonia Orchestra’s Music of Today series at the Royal Festival Hall in London.

His debut CD, Waterlines, featuring performances by Talea Ensemble, JACK Quartet, and others, was released on New Focus Recordings in 2018. A second recording of Waterlines by ICTUS was released in 2020.

Christopher is a 2019 fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and a winner of a 2019 Fromm Commission from Harvard University, along with the 2020 Barlow Prize.

In 2021-2022 he is serving as Visiting Assistant Professor of Composition at the USC Thornton School of Music. He splits his time between Los Angeles and Palermo.