The Peabody Conservatory of the Johns Hopkins University will welcome Christopher Cerrone and Harold Meltzer to its composition faculty for the 2019-20 academic year while faculty artist Kevin Puts is on sabbatical.
Acclaimed for compositions characterized by a subtle handling of timbre and resonance, a deep literary fluency, and a flair for multimedia collaborations, Christopher Cerrone writes a major new orchestral work with electronics for the Los Angeles Philharmonic this season. Other commissions include a new sextet co-commissioned by Latitude 49, Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble, and Sentieri Selvaggi; and a new concerto for Third Coast Percussion, co-commissioned by the Civic Orchestra of Chicago and the Britt Festival. Recent highlights include Breaks and Breaks, an acclaimed violin concerto for Jennifer Koh and the Detroit Symphony, led by Peter Oundjian; a Miller Theatre Composer Portrait performed by Third Coast Percussion; Will There Be Singing, for the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra for Jeffrey Kahane’s final concert as LACO music director; Can’t and Won’t, commissioned by the Calder Quartet and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and new solo works for artists including Tim Munro, Eighth Blackbird, Vicky Chow, and Rachel Lee Priday. Cerrone’s opera, Invisible Cities, was a finalist for the 2014 Pulitzer Prize and was praised by The Los Angeles Times as “A delicate and beautiful opera…[which] could be, and should be, done anywhere.” Cerrone holds degrees from the Yale School of Music and the Manhattan School of Music. He is published by Schott NY and Project Schott New York.
Composer Harold Meltzer is inspired by a wide variety of stimuli, from architectural spaces to postmodern fairy tales and messages inscribed in fortune cookies. In Fanfare Magazine, Robert Carl commented that he “seems to write pieces of scrupulous craft and exceptional freshness, which makes each seem like an important contribution.” His current projects include a duet cycle of songs for countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo and tenor Paul Appleby of the American Modern Opera Company, and a full-evening work for The Crossing Choir and Sandbox Percussion. A Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2009 for his sextet Brion, Meltzer has been awarded the Rome Prize, the Barlow Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and both the Arts and Letters Award in Music and the Charles Ives Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Commissions in recent years have issued from the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Pittsburgh Symphony, Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, Boston Modern Orchestra Project, the Fromm and Koussevitzky Music Foundations, New Music USA, the McKim Fund at the Library of Congress, Boston Chamber Music Society, Concert Artists Guild, the ASCAP Foundation for the New York Festival of Song, and the Brooklyn Art Song Society. Founder and co-director for 15 years of the new music ensemble Sequitur, Meltzer studied at Amherst College, the Yale School of Music, Columbia Law School, and King’s College, Cambridge, and has taught previously at Amherst and Vassar Colleges.
