 WALTMANSEARLY AND CONTEMPORARY MUSIC |
|||||||
|
|
home | links | contact | ||||
|
musicians composers interviews masterclasses competitions festivals writings cd's cdarchive |
|||||||
 |
|||||||
|
|
CHRISTOPHER TRAPANI (US) Christopher Trapani was born in New Orleans, Louisiana in 1980. His formative musical encounters included trumpet lessons at age nine, a pawn shop guitar purchased three years later, then piano lessons from the age of fourteen. Christopher first studied composition under Stephen Dankner at the New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts, where he was awarded a Certificate of Artistry in 1998 as the school's first graduate to specialize in composition. Following a year of study with Malcolm Peyton at New England Conservatory in Boston, Christopher transferred to Harvard College, where he earned a Bachelor’s degree in Music and English and American Literature and Language, studying composition with Bernard Rands and poetry under Helen Vendler. With the support of a Frank Knox Memorial Fellowship, he then travelled to London in 2002 to pursue a Masters of Music degree at the Royal College of Music with Julian Anderson. He then spent four years in Paris, where he held a residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts and worked with the French composer Philippe Leroux. Christopher now lives in Istanbul on a Fulbright grant, working at the MIAM at Istanbul Technical University. In the fall of 2008 he will return to Paris to take part in the composition and music technology cursus at Ircam. Christopher was recently awarded the 2007 Gaudeamus Prize. He has also won a BMI Student Composer Award (2006) and two Morton Gould Young Composers Awards from ASCAP (2005, 2006), as well as the Bearns Prize from Columbia University (2006) and the 2005 Wayne Peterson Prize from Earplay. He has twice been chosen to compete for the Gaudeamus Prize: in 2006 with Sing Into My Mouth, and in 2007 with Sparrow Episodes. His scores have been performed by the Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, ASKO Ensemble, Earplay, the Netherlands Radio Kamer Filharmonie, members of the Philharmonia Orchestra, the American Composers Orchestra, Ensemble Cairn, members of the Orchestre Nationale de Lorraine, members of the Ensemble Orchestral Contemporain, the Auros Group for New Music, the Chameleon Arts Ensemble of Boston, and pianist Sergey Schepkin. He has taken part in courses at the Conservatoire Américan at Fontainebleau, working under Andre Bon and Allain Gaussin, and in the "Voix Nouvelles" workshop at Royaumont Abbey in 2004, led by Brian Ferneyhough, Luca Francesconi, and Philippe Leroux. More recently, in August 2006, he worked with Denys Bouliane at the 'Rencontres de Musique Nouvelle' at Domaine Forget, where his Sparrow Episodes was selected as the 'coup de coeur' by the members of the Nouvel Ensemble Moderne. He also took part in the New Music Technology course at IRCAM in June 2006. Christopher’s recent works include two orchestral score: North, selected for the American Composers Orchestra’s reading sessions in May 2004, and Canaries in the Morning, Balloons at Night, commissioned for the 20th anniversary of the Acadiana Symphony Orchestra (Lafayette, Louisiana). His solo piano piece The Silence of a Falling Star Lights Up a Purple Sky, commissioned for Sergey Schepkin by the Fleet Boston Celebrity Series (Boston, Massachusetts), was premiered in Boston's Jordan Hall in April 2005, and his sextet Sunflower Suite, written in response to an invitation from the Philharmonia Orchestra’s Music of Today series and premiered in London at the Royal Festival Hall and National Gallery in June 2003, was given its American Premiere in March 2006 by Earplay in San Francisco. Projects for the 2007-2008 season include a trip to Amsterdam for a performance of Sparrow Episodes with the ASKO enesmble at Gaudeamus Music Week in September, and a repeat performance of Sparrow Episodes with the NEM in Montreal in October 2007. Along with Colombian composer Juan Camilo Hernandez Sanchez and Australian composer Paul Clift, he is a founding member of the Three Hemispheres composers collective, a Paris-based association for the promotion of young composers in France. Christopher is also active as a conductor and a performer, and can often be found playing piano, guitar, or mandolin in reputable establishments on both sides of the Atlantic, from Place Pigalle to the French Quarter. www.christophertrapani.com |
|
|||||
