Christopher Cerrone
Composer Christopher Cerrone has earned an international reputation for music that is at once lush and detailed, rigorous, and sensuously appealing. Winning or appearing on shortlists for some of the American music world's top prizes, he is often commissioned by major performing organizations to compose new works.
Cerrone was born March 5, 1984, in Huntington, New York, on Long Island. He attended the Manhattan School of Music, studying composition with Nils Vigeland, and then moved on to Yale for master's and doctoral degrees. Among his teachers there were Christopher Theofanidis, David Lang, and Martin Bresnick. Affiliated with the Red Light New Music and Sleeping Giant composers' groups (and co-founding the former), he began to gain national attention in the middle 2000s decade for such works as the three e.e. cummings poems for choir (2004) and the Invisible Overture for orchestra (2008). Cerrone has written two operas, All Wounds Bleed (2011), for soprano, mezzo-soprano, tenor, and piano, and Invisible Cities (2013), for four solo voices, chamber choir, chamber orchestra, and electronics. The latter work was one of several important works by Cerrone to mix electronics (or electric instruments) with conventional instruments; others include How to Breathe Underwater (2011) for baritone, trumpet, trombone, bass clarinet, and prerecorded electronics.
Cerrone won or came close to winning several of the contemporary music world's most important prizes: he has won several prizes from the music licensing organization ASCAP, won the 2015 Rome Prize, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2014. Those prizes have stimulated new commissions, including those from the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Present Music, and the String Orchestra of Brooklyn, which released a recording of Cerrone's High Windows in 2020. The 2019-2020 season saw the premiere of a new Cerrone ballet score by the Vienna Philharmonic, the piano concerto The Air Suspended, and The Last Message Received, a choral-orchestral work jointly commissioned by the Northwestern University Chorus, the Yale Symphony Orchestra, and the Yale Glee Club. Cerrone's works have been recorded by eighth blackbird, the Los Angeles Percussion Quartet, and other important contemporary music groups. Cerrone served as a guest faculty member at the Peabody Institute in Baltimore in the 2019-2020 academic year.
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Discography
5 album(s) • Sorted by Bestseller
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Beyond
Los Angeles Percussion Quartet, Christopher Cerrone
Classical - Released by Sono Luminus on 16 Jun 2017
24-Bit 192.0 kHz - Stereo -
Ash
Ashley Bathgate, Christopher Cerrone, Ted Hearne
Classical - Released by New Amsterdam on 27 Sep 2019
16-Bit CD Quality 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
The Arching Path
Classical - Released by In A Circle Records on 21 May 2021
24-Bit 88.2 kHz - Stereo -
As We Are
Julian Velasco, Winston Choi, Elijah Daniel Smith, Christopher Cerrone
Classical - Released by Cedille on 19 Aug 2022
24-Bit 96.0 kHz - Stereo -
Christopher Cerrone: Beaufort Scales
Lorelei Ensemble, Christopher Cerrone, Beth Willer
Classical - To be released on 17 May 2024 by Cold Blue Music
16-Bit CD Quality 44.1 kHz - Stereo