Marc Mellits

Composer Marc Mellits incorporates popular influences into minimalist and post-minimalist techniques, sometimes writing for an electric guitar or other electronic instruments. He is the artistic director and keyboardist of his ensemble, the Mellits Consort. Mellits was born in Baltimore in 1966. He began taking piano lessons at age six, but he was writing piano music even before that. Mellits attended the Eastman School of Music in Rochester as an undergraduate, completing his studies in 1988 and writing a piano concerto and several chamber works while there. He went on to the Yale School of Music from 1989 to 1991 and to Cornell University from 1991 to 1996, also attending courses at the Tanglewood Music Festival in Massachusetts. His teachers have included Jacob Druckman, Christopher Rouse, and Steven Stucky. Many of his works in the 1990s were for chamber ensembles. Beginning with Aggravated Assault for two amplified pianos (1991), they often included electronic elements, and their rock influences have attracted crossover audiences. By the 2000s, Mellits was attracting commissions from both traditional ensembles such as the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra (for which he composed Brick in 2005), the Canadian Brass, and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam, and those oriented toward contemporary music, including the Kronos Quartet and the Bang on a Can All-Stars. Mellits founded the Common Sense Composers Collective, which issued the album The Shock of the Old, containing a set of nine Miniatures by Mellits, in 2001. His music has been performed at Carnegie Hall, Washington's Kennedy Center, and various European festivals, and in the 2000s, it began to appear on recordings. In 2006, the composer and his Mellits Consort issued Paranoid Cheese, a collection of 11 chamber works by Mellits. Mellits teaches composition at the University of Illinois Chicago, where he held the rank of associate professor as of 2021. Various performers have continued to record his music, and in 2019, a movement of his String Quartet No. 3 was heard on the album Spark by the Friction Quartet.
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