Clancy Newman

Cellist and composer Clancy Newman has developed innovative playing techniques in a set of works based on popular songs. He has performed widely with orchestras and several chamber groups. Newman was born in 1977 in Albany, New York. His parents were Australian. Newman began cello lessons at six, and when he was 12, he took the gold medal at Australia's Dandenong Festival, which was open to contestants up to age 24. Newman attended the Columbia-Juilliard combined program in New York, where students can combine music studies at the Juilliard School with majors in other fields at Columbia; at Juilliard, his teachers were Joel Krosnick and Harvey Shapiro. At Columbia, he earned a B.A. Newman gained visibility from a first-place showing at the 2001 Naumburg International Cello Competition in New York; part of his prize was the chance to present a recital at New York's Alice Tully Hall. He made his recording debut in 2007 on the album Here of Amazing Most Now by composer Gerald Levinson. Newman has appeared as a cello soloist with such American orchestras as the National Symphony, the Jacksonville Symphony, and the Hartford Symphony, as well as in Europe, Asia, and Australia. A frequent chamber music player, he has appeared at the Marlboro Festival in Vermont and has been a member of the Chicago Chamber Musicians, the Clarosa Piano Quartet, and the Weiss-Kaplan-Newman Trio (with pianist Yael Weiss and violinist Mark Kaplan). The latter group released an album of piano trios by Brahms and Smetana in 2011 and the recital An American Tour in 2014; that album included Newman's own Juxt-Opposition, a work employing his "Golden Ratio Method" of composition. The method was used in several other compositions, including From Method to Madness, for cello and piano and Palindromicanon for two cellos. In the mid-2010s, Newman, for a time, as part of his Pop-Unpopped project, wrote a cello caprice based on the song that was number one at the time on the Billboard magazine Hot 100; these pieces were based on songs by such stars as Taylor Swift, Ed Sheeran, and Meghan Trainor. Newman made his solo debut in 2023, accompanied by pianist Natalie Zhu, on the Albany label album From Method to Madness: The American Sound; that album included Newman's own title track.
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