Louis Karchin

A composer of "fearless eloquence" (Andrew Porter, The New Yorker), Louis Karchin has a highly acclaimed compositional portfolio of over sixty works. He was born in Philadelphia in 1951 and studied at the Eastman School of Music and Harvard University. Recent music includes vocal-instrumental song cycles Songs of John Keats, Songs of Distance and Light, Orpheus, American Visions, and his latest work, The Gods of Winter. Recently, the Guggenheim Museum presented his 70-minute one-act comic opera Romulus, in a fully-staged production, and his Chesapeake Festival Overture was premiered this past summer by the Orchestra di Stato della Romania at the Alba Music Festival (Italy) and performed shortly after by the Chesapeake Orchestra at the River Concert Series of St. Mary's College, MD.

Karchin's music has been commissioned and performed by some of the world's most acclaimed ensembles for new music, including the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, the Group for Contemporary Music, the Da Capo Chamber Players, the New York New Music Ensemble, the Louisville Orchestra, the Delta Ensemble of Amsterdam (Netherlands), and Spectrum Sonori (South Korea). New World, Albany and CRI labels have recorded his works and C. F. Peters Corporation and ACA have published his compositions. He is the recipient of Koussevitzky and Barlow Foundation Commissions, and two awards each from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Fromm Music Foundation at Harvard University. Mr. Karchin is Professor of Music at New York University, teaching in an advanced graduate program in composition which he organized for the Department of Music in 1989.