Louis Karchin
Biography
The composer of music of "fearless eloquence" (Andrew Porter, the New Yorker), LOUIS KARCHIN has received significant acclaim for a compositional portfolio of over 50 works. The American Academy of Arts and Letters, in its most recent citation to the composer, singled out the "unparalleled sense of line and unity" of Karchin's music; an earlier citation hailed his Songs of John Keats as "a striking conception, in which the sonic properties of the poetry interact with musical material in unprecedented fusion...". His two recent extended vocal-instrumental song cycles for baritone, Orpheus, and American Visions, have garnered high critical praise, and a previous cycle for soprano, Songs of Distance and Light, was hailed at its premiere by the San Francisco Chronicle as "a work of coruscating beauty... one of the signal new music events of the season." With commissions and performances by some of the world's most acclaimed ensembles for new music--the Group for Contemporary Music, the New York New Music Ensemble, the Da Capo Chamber Players, the Delta Ensemble of Amsterdam, Holland, and the Louisville Orchestra among them--Karchin's music has been heard throughout the United States, Europe, and in the Far East. The British music journal, Contemporary Music Review singled out Karchin as one of twenty-five of the most exciting American composers born in the decade of the 1950's, and Karchin was chosen as one of 53 composers selected to represent New York at the turn of the Millennium in the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center's "Great Day in New York" Festival at Alice Tully Hall.
Karchin (born, Philadelphia, 1951) studied at the Eastman School of Music and Harvard University; his principal teachers have included Samuel Adler, Joseph Schwantner, Fred Lerdahl, and Earl Kim. Additional study included two summers as a Leonard Bernstein Fellow in Composition at the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood, an experience which brought Karchin into contact with such composers as Elliott Carter, Jacob Druckman, Gunther Schuller, Bruno Maderna, and Charles Wuorinen. At the conclusion of his first summer at Tanglewood, Karchin was awarded the Center's prestigious Koussevitzky Tanglewood Award. Karchin became Assistant Professor of Music at New York University in 1979, and is now Professor of Music in NYU's Faculty of Arts and Science, teaching in an advanced graduate program in composition, which he organized in 1989.
Mr. Karchin has been active as a performer and conductor of new music as well as an organizer of new music events. Recognizing early on the importance of becoming involved in performance, Karchin co-founded, in his graduate student days, the Harvard Group for New Music, an ensemble which is now the most important forum for the presentation of student composition at Harvard University. Almost immediately upon Mr. Karchin's arrival in New York, he was elected Vice President, then President, then Chairman, of the League-ISCM, one of the country's oldest organizations devoted to the presentation of contemporary music. During his tenure as Chairman, he co-founded the Chamber Players of the League-ISCM, an ensemble which includes some of New York's finest new music specialists. In 1980, Karchin also became a Co-director of the Washington Square Contemporary Music Society, an organization which has garnered wide-spread critical acclaim for its annual three-concert series of new chamber music at Merkin Hall in New York each year. In 2001, Fanfare Magazine labeled the Society "among the world's most outstanding new music ensembles."
Recent performances of Mr. Karchin's music have included the premiere of his Rhapsody for Orchestra, by the Louisville Orchestra, and the premiere of his latest vocal-instrumental song cycle, Orpheus, by the Earplay Ensemble of San Francisco. A Fiftieth Birthday Concert of his music in September of 2002 included four new songs for soprano and piano, the premiere of Voyages, for alto saxophone and piano, and his 25-minute vocal-instrumental cycle, American Visions, on poetry of Yevgeny Yevtushenko, performed with the poet in attendance. In the fall of 2004, the Da Capo Chamber Players presented American Visions on tour in Russia at the Moscow Autumn and St. Petersburg Sound Ways Festivals. Karchin's music is available on New World and CRI labels, with a new disc to be released in 2005 by Albany Records. Thirty-one of his compositions are published by C. F. Peters Corporation.
Mr. Karchin's awards and honors include the Koussevitzky Tanglewood Award, the Columbia University Bearns Prize, a Danforth Fellowship, two NEA Composer Fellowships, the Walter N. Hinrichsen Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the American Composers Alliance Recording Award, a commission from the Serge Koussevitzky Music Foundation, the Heckscher Foundation Composition Prize, a Goddard Lieberson Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Barlow Foundation Commission, and, most recently, a prize from the National Association of Teachers of Singing. In the summer of 2000, Mr. Karchin was Composer-in-Residence at the Composers' Conference at Wellesley College; in October of 2002, he was Maurice Abravanel Distinguished Visiting Composer at the University of Utah.
Mr. Karchin lives in Short Hills, New Jersey, with his wife, Julie Sirota Karchin, and their daughters, Marisa and Lindsay.