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Christopher Cerrone Joins Mannes School of Music Composition Faculty

Mannes School of Music at The New School’s College of Performing Arts (CoPA) is pleased to announce the appointment of Christopher Cerrone to the Mannes Composition Faculty, chaired by David T. Little.

“Chris Cerrone has been at Mannes/CoPA for the past year, teaching courses such as orchestration and has been a big hit with the students and the entire community of faculty and staff. Many here were already admirers of Chris’s unique and wonderful brand of music composition and I know that he will be a big success teaching both undergraduate and graduate composition majors,” said Richard Kessler, Executive Dean of the College of Performing Arts and Dean of Mannes.


“It has been an enormous pleasure to teach at Mannes and I am honored to be joining this world-class composition faculty, which once included composers such as Ernest Bloch and Bohuslav Martinu and now includes some of today’s leading composers whom I am lucky to count as friends and colleagues. I am also thrilled to be working alongside other incredible teaching artists at Mannes as well as deepening my relationship with the broader New School community,” said Christopher Cerrone.


About Christopher Cerrone


Christopher Cerrone (b. 1984) is internationally acclaimed for compositions characterized by a subtle handling of timbre and resonance, a deep literary fluency, and a flair for multimedia collaborations. Balancing lushness and austerity, immersive textures and telling details, dramatic impact, and interiority, Cerrone’s GRAMMY-nominated music is utterly compelling and uniquely his own.


The 2021–22 season will see the premiere of In a Grove, a new opera composed with librettist Stephanie Fleischmann that was commissioned by LA Opera and will premiere at Pittsburgh Opera in February 2022. Cerrone will also compose a new clarinet quintet jointly commissioned by the Kaleidoscope Chamber Orchestra, Omega Ensemble, Third Angle New Music, and Chatter ABQ. And in April 2022, the Phoenix Symphony will premiere The Age of Wire and String, a new orchestral suite as part of a Cerrone-curated program.


The 2021–22 season will also see the premiere of The Last Message Received, jointly commissioned by Northwestern University and the Yale Symphony Orchestra and Glee Club, as well as new works for pianist David Kaplan, mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke, cellist Johannes Moser, and pianist Anthony DeMare (the Liaisons project, adapting the music of Stephen Sondheim).


Recent highlights include A Body, Moving, concerto for brass and orchestra commissioned by the Cincinnati Symphony; The Air Suspended, a piano concerto for pianist Shai Wosner; Don’t Look Down, a concerto grosso for Conor Hanick and Sandbox Percussion that premiered at Caramoor; The Insects Became Magnetic, an orchestral work with electronics for the Los Angeles Philharmonic; Meander Spiral, Explode, a percussion quartet concerto co-commissioned by the Civic Orchestra of the Chicago Symphony and the Britt Festival; and Breaks and Breaks, an acclaimed violin concerto for Jennifer Koh and the Detroit Symphony.


Cerrone’s opera, Invisible Cities, a 2014 Pulitzer Prize finalist, 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. Both the film and opera are available as CDs, DVDs, and digital downloads. In July 2019, New Amsterdam Records released his GRAMMY-nominated sophomore effort, The Pieces that Fall to Earth, a collaboration with the LA-based chamber orchestra, Wild Up, to widespread acclaim. His most recent release is The Arching Path, released on In a Circle Records. Cerrone is also the winner of the 2015-2016 Samuel Barber Rome Prize in Music Composition.


Christopher Cerrone holds degrees from the Yale School of Music and the Manhattan School of Music. His work is published by Schott NY and Project Schott New York. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, writer Carrie Sun, an alumna of The New School’s MFA Program in Creative Writing.


Click here to read full article on The New School website.


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