ABOUT

Nathan Davis "writes music that deals deftly and poetically with timbre and sonority" (NY Times). His opera/ballet “Hagoromo" was produced by American Opera Projects and premiered at the BAM Next Wave Festival with the International Contemporary Ensemble, the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, choreographer David Neumann, and dancers Wendy Whelan, and Jock Soto. And Lincoln Center presented the premiere of “Bells”, a site-specific work for ensemble, multi-channel audio, and live broadcast to audience members’ mobile phones. 

Nathan received other commissions from GMEM and Ensemble CBarré (Marseille), FringeArts and the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage (Philadelphia), Donaueschinger Musiktage (Germany), Yarn/Wire, Claire Chase, Ekmeles, Miller Theatre, Ojai Music Festival, the Calder Quartet, and Third Coast Percussion, with premieres at Tanglewood, Park Avenue Armory, Guggenheim Museum, and Carnegie Hall. His music has been released on Starkland, Tundra, New Focus, and Bridge.

The Aaron Copland Fellow at the Bogliasco Foundation, Davis received awards and fellowships from the Camargo Foundation, New Music USA, NYSCA, Meet The Composer, Fromm Foundation, Jerome Foundation, American Music Center, MATA, and ASCAP. He and Phyllis Chen won an NY Innovative Theater Award for their score to Sylvia Milo's play “The Other Mozart”. 

Also an active percussionist and member of the International Contemporary Ensemble, he appeared as a concerto soloist with the Seattle Symphony, Tokyo Symphony, and Nagoya Philharmonic. A graduate of Rice, Yale, and the Rotterdam Conservatory, Nathan currently teaches at The New School.

And.

Composer and percussionist. Acoustic and electronic. Artist and educator. Concert and theater.

And. My craft is represented as much by this conjunction as by the nouns and names it connects.

The following recitation distills my bio into some of my most meaningful relationships: with musicians, with artists in adjacent fields, with audiences, with the next generation.

With.

Inspired by natural processes and acoustic phenomena, I make music that elucidates essential characters of instruments and the fragile athleticism of playing them. I am drawn to explore acoustic space as a source of narrative and engage its emotional effect on communication. Amplification and electronics are often used organically with instruments in my work to reveal and exaggerate subtle complexities of sound, forming an architectural sound-world through which the audience travels in experiencing a piece.

The son of an architect and a soprano, I trained as violinist and percussionist and used a Roland D-20 to sequence songs and sculpt waveforms. As a young musician I knew nothing about experimental music and simply delighted in making strange sounds. In high school I saw a PBS documentary on John Cage in which he explored the sounds of a cactus while Merce Cunningham explored movement. Now that was a job description I didn’t know existed! I also found a cd of music by Xenakis: composer and architect.

I resisted the repeated call to choose between composition and performance during college. I attended Rice University for my undergraduate studies, receiving Bachelor of Music degrees in both Composition and in Performance, Magna Cum Laude, in 1996. That year, I received a Fulbright Fellowship to study at the Rotterdams Conservatorium in Holland, where I earned an Uitvoerend Musicus in percussion with Robert Van Sice in 1997. I then attended the Yale School of Music, completing my Master of Music degree in 1999.

In the years immediately after finishing school, I began to truly find my own voice as a musician. I bought my first computer and began playing music by Kaija Saariaho and others, created for performer with live electronics. My own explorations with my instruments and microphones opened up entirely new worlds for me, and suggested new paths of discovery, form, and expression. During this time I lived in Vermont, then Boston, then Amsterdam, and I founded several contemporary music ensembles. I settled in New York City at the end of 2005, and it remains my home and base of operations for creating new work and realizing the work of others.

With audiences:

Lincoln Center inaugurated its Tully Scope Festival with the premiere of my work Bells, for ensemble, live processing, and a system of spatialization that broadcasts to audience members’ mobile phones - described by Tommassini in the NYTimes as "an alluring and pensive musical experience". A look into the sounds and meanings of our means of communication, Bells is a site-specific work, flexible and adaptable to a variety of spaces and durations.

Ten years to the day of my move to NYC, the 2015 BAM Next Wave Festival and American Opera Projects presented the world premiere of Hagoromo, my 75-minute chamber dance-opera that reimagines the Noh drama of that name. The five sold-out performances in the Harvey Theatre featured the International Contemporary Ensemble, soloists Katalin Karolyi and Peter Tantsits, the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, and legendary dancers Wendy Whelan and Jock Soto. Hagoromo was also the focus of a preview and discussion event at “Works and Process” at the Guggenheim Museum. (In 2018 it was released on CD on the Tundra label.)

In September, 2018, organist Parker Kitterman and the International Contemporary Ensemble premiered In Plain Air, a secular and site-specific celebration of a new Fisk tracker organ, installed at the historic Christ Church in Philadelphia, with movements divided between Phyllis Chen and myself. My movements included works for 11 instrumentalists with organ, duos with organ and another instrument, as well as Bellarmonic for carillon or fixed media, which uses samples of eleven bells (bought by Benjamin Franklin in 1754) activated in unusual ways.

And concerts:

My work has also been premiered at The Kitchen, Roulette, Merkin Hall, Miller Theatre, Hakuju Hall (Tokyo), Kennedy Center and MoMA, The Japan Society, in portrait concerts at LPR and at the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, at the Park Avenue Armory, Carnegie Hall, and Symphony Space.

Other premieres have been presented at festivals including Big Ears (2017); Lincoln Center Out of Doors Festival (2016); ACHT BRÜCKEN | Musik für Köln, Aspekte Festival Salzburg, and Sweet Thunder: SFCMP Festival of Electro-Acoustic Music (2014); portrait concerts at Spoleto Festival USA (2013) and at Santa Fe New Music (2012); American Composers Orchestra SONiC Festival, and Perth Totally Huge Music Festival (2011); Darmstadt and MATA (2010); and Helsinki Music Nova, Audio Art Festival Krakow, and Ojai Music Festival (2009); and Look and Listen Festival (2007, 2012, and 2016).

Perhaps not surprisingly, I write a good bit of music for percussion. Steven Schick commissioned Crystal Radio (2012, a Fromm commission), which he premiered as part of his historic 2-night retrospective at Miller Theatre (NYC). I was also involved with Yarn/Wire’s residency at Issue Project Room, for which I wrote de clocher à clocher (released in 2017). Reviewing this show for the NYTimes, Steve Smith wrote “Nathan Davis writes music that deals deftly and poetically with timbre and sonority”. I wrote Simple Songs of Birth and Return for Doug Perkins, as well as ensemble pieces for TimeTable/Talujon and Ethos.

Many of my works for other instruments are inspired by my close relationships with colleagues in the International Contemporary Ensemble, including a series of solos with electronics. I have written two pieces for flutist and founder Claire Chase, as well as solos for pianist and harmonium player Jacob Greenberg, toy pianist Phyllis Chen, clarinetist Joshua Rubin, bassoonist Rebekah Heller, toy pianist Phyllis Chen, saxophonist Ryan Muncy, and cellist Katinka Kleijn.

And in residence:

As a Fellow at the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France, I wrote my second string quartet, Echeia, which was commissioned for the Calder Quartet by the Donaueschinger Musiktage. I also wrote Quatre Huîtres (2016), a solo for hammered dulcimer, which I premiered at the Mostly Mozart Festival. In March, 2018, I returned for a second residency at Camargo, working with technicians at the GMEM in Marseille in developing electronics for Inside Voice, for large ensemble. That May it was premiered by a blended group of Ensemble CBarré and International Contemporary Ensemble at GMEM’s “Festival les Musiques” in Marseille. Meanwhile I was the Aaron Copland Fellow in Music at the Bogliasco Foundation in Italy during April and May, 2018 developing I am the utterance of my name with Sylvia Milo.

And theater:

Playwright/performer Sylvia Milo and I formed Little Matchstick Factory, a theater production company, to create music theater that connects characters, archetypes and narratives from the past with pivotal issues of our time. Little Matchstick Factory researches exhaustively, finding new and direct relevance in primary sources. Phyllis Chen and I won an 2015 NY Innovative Theater Award for our score to Sylvia Milo's monodrama The Other Mozart, for which I also received a Drama Desk nomination for Outstanding Sound Design. Telling the true and largely forgotten story of Nannerl Mozart, sister of Wolfgang Amadeus, the play has been very successful, winning many awards and enjoying extended runs Off-Broadway in New York City, Los Angeles, London, and Hong Kong, tours across the US and Germany, and special presentations in the Mozart Wohnhaus in Salzburg and the Mozart Apartment in Vienna.

Milo and I are currently developing our second production, I am the utterance of my name, a multifaceted work on the mythic and historic Mary Magdalene. In addition to the residency at Bogliasco, we were invited to workshop the piece at the Baryshnikov Arts Center (NYC) in May-June 2019, and continue our work with support from New Music USA and NYSCA, with a planned premiere in 2022.

We are also raising our baby boy.

With words:

When writing for voice I feel a close collaboration with text, pushing me in musical directions I wouldn’t find otherwise. Bell of Silence (2013) sets a gorgeous poem by poet Jennifer Michael (also my sister), for SATB chorus and handbells. On the Nature of Thingness (2011) is a song cycle on disparate texts by Zbigniew Herbert, Hugo Ball, Artur Rimbaud, and Italo Calvino, written for Tony Arnold and large ensemble, including a chorus of jaw harps. In 2014 I wrote ASK (a Sound uttered, a Silence crossed) with a libretto created by Laura Mullen, for large chorus, percussion quartet, and broadcast to mobile phones (co-commissioned by the La Jolla Symphony Chorus, red fish blue fish, Third Coast Percussion, Notre Dame College, SO Percussion, Princeton Chorale, and Williams College). Tanglewood Music Center presented the world premiere of The Sand Reckoner (2017) with texts on innumerability I edited from Archimedes, Blake, and others, described by the Boston Globe as “a microcosmic masterpiece”.

And recorded media:

Albums of my music include the premiere production recording of Hagoromo (Tundra), On the Nature of Thingness on Starkland Records (2016, supported by an Aaron Copland Fund for Music recording grant and winner of the Independent Music Awards: Best Contemporary Classical Album) and The Bright and Hollow Sky on New Focus Recordings (performed by ICE and one of TimeOut NY's top 5 classical albums of 2011). My pieces appear on Claire Chase's debut Aliento and Density iii, Currents Vol. 0 from Yarn/Wire, Travel Diary from the Meehan/Perkins Duo, Simple Songs from Doug Perkins, 100 Names from Rebekah Heller, Little Things from Phyllis Chen, Electric Currents from the Calder Quartet, and my electroacoustic percussion disc Memory Spaces. My pieces have also been featured on NPR's All Things Considered, on Live From Lincoln Center broadcast on PBS, on WNYC's New Sounds Live, KALW’s Then and Now, American Public Media's The Story, and heard frequently on WKCR and Q2.

With sticks:

I have been a member and percussionist with the International Contemporary Ensemble since 2007. I have premiered hundreds if not thousands of pieces, fostering emerging composers and working closely with luminaries such as George Lewis, Du Yun, Marcos Balter, Chaya Czernowin, Anna Thorwaldsdottir, Pauline Oliveros, and David Lang, to name but a few. I appeared as a concerto soloist with the Seattle Symphony, Tokyo Symphony, and Nagoya Philharmonic playing Dai Fujikura’s Mina. In 2010 I was part of an all-start percussion sextet that performed Xenakis’s Persephassa on boats in and around the Central Park Lake. And in 2016 I performed Steve Reich’s “Quartet” in Carnegie Hall in celebration of his 80th birthday. Touring has brought me to fantastic locations around the world, often obliging me to adapt to available instruments and non-grounded electricity.

I have played on dozens of physical cd releases, recording for Nonesuch, Tzadik, Mode, Kairos, New Focus, New Albion, Bridge, BMOP, and Cold Blue records. And I appear briefly in the film “(Untitled)” with Adam Goldberg!

Much of my playing in recent years has involved the hammered dulcimer. I have written extensively for it, and have premiered many pieces by other composers who were inspired to use it.

With students:

I encourage my students to integrate the creative, interpretive, analytical, and aesthetic aspects of their music study. I employ individualized approaches to inspire and encourage my students and their ideas. For some it involves helping them develop the creative habit and engage consciously with process, while for others it means helping with the critical skills to focus and refine from amongst an abundance of ideas. In all cases, my goal is to help students develop individual voices as creators and/or interpreters while also challenging them to grow and try new things.

I currently teach courses I co-created in electronic music composition and technology in the College of Performing Arts at The New School. At Montclair State University, I created an electronic music program that includes required courses, an advanced electronic composition seminar, and a laptop ensemble, while also keeping a full studio of private composition students. I also taught percussion and led the New Music Ensemble at Dartmouth College for eight years, and was an artist in residence at The Walden School for ten summers.

I have given masterclasses on composition, electronics, and extended percussion techniques at the University of Michigan, Manhattan School of Music, UC Berkeley, CalArts, Hamilton College, University of Western Michigan, USC, Georgia Tech, Rice, Baylor, Yale, and the Akademia Muzyczna in Krakow, Poland, with additional residencies at Harvard, Princeton, UCSD, Brown, and other universities across North America.

And. With.

I feel artistically most whole when the nouns, names, and ideas above are connected in a balanced and meaningful way. While any particular day, week, or month may be monomindedly focused on one or another aspect of my career, zooming out reveals a fairly consistent mixture that makes up my artistic whole and keeps me renewed, connected, and inspired.

And I thank you for your interest and for this connection.