CHRISTOPHER CERRONE / COMPOSER

Winner of a 2015 Rome Prize and a finalist for the 2014 Pulitzer Prize, the Brooklyn-based composer Christopher Cerrone is internationally acclaimed for music which ranges from opera to orchestral, from chamber music to electronic. Throughout, his music is characterized by a subtle handling of timbre and resonance, a deep literary fluency, and a flair for multimedia collaborations.

In the current season, Cerrone has world premieres with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra (for Jeffrey Kahane’s final concert as LACO Music Director), the Calder Quartet at the Broad Stage; Third Coast Percussion and Rachel Calloway for the DeBartolo Performing Arts Center at the University of Notre Dame; and an electroacoustic work for flutist Tim Munro at Miller Theatre.

Other highlights include performances of recent works by Tito Muñoz and the Phoenix Symphony; Eighth Blackbird at The Ringling (their recording of the Sleeping Giant collaborative work, Hand Eye, is available on Cedille Records); Jennifer Koh at the Cincinnati Arts Center; and Vicky Chow at Roulette. His works are also performed throughout the season by violinist Rachel Lee Priday, cellist Ashley Bathgate, and at Caramoor, the Festival Nuova Consonanza in Rome, the Balliet im Revier in Gelsenkirchen, Germany, at the Kennedy Center, and elsewhere.

Cerrone curates an evening for New York Festival of Song (NYFOS Next, featuring Theo Bleckmann) at National Sawdust, and looks forward to a residency with Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble. 16/17 also includes new releases from New Amsterdam Records – albums from Vicky Chow and the Living Earth Show – and on VIA Records, including a recording of Memory Palace by Ian Rosenbaum, and an upcoming all-Cerrone album from Christopher Rountree and wild Up.

Recent commissions include The Pieces That Fall to Earth, for the LA Philharmonic; The Branch Will Not Break for Present Music and the Hearing Voices Ensemble; The Naomi Songs for Theo Bleckmann and the Albany Symphony’s Dogs of Desire; live original scores for installations at the New Museum and the Time Warner Center by artist and filmmaker Marco Brambilla; and a new work for the Cornell Glee Club, among others.

Cerrone’s opera, Invisible Cities, based on Italo Calvino’s landmark novel, was praised by The Los Angeles Times as “A delicate and beautiful opera…[which] could be, and should be, done anywhere.” Invisible Cities received its fully- staged world premiere in a wildly popular production by The Industry, directed by Yuval Sharon in Los Angeles’ Union Station. It was released in 2014 as a commercial recording by The Industry’s in-house label.

A co-founder of Red Light New Music – whose 2015 release, Barbary Coast, features his haunting work, The Night Mare – Christopher Cerrone is one-sixth of the Sleeping Giant composer collective, with whom he served as co-composer- in-residence at the Albany Symphony from 2014-2017. He holds degrees from the Yale School of Music and the Manhattan School of Music, and is published by Schott NY and Project Schott New York.