Faculty

Profile

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. Its release on cd was hailed by Opera News for its “contrapuntal passages of Mozartean elegance”. 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, described in the NYTimes by Anthony Tommasini as “an alluring and pensive musical experience”.  

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 (called “a macrocosmic masterpiece” by The Boston Globe), Park Avenue Armory, Guggenheim Museum, and Carnegie Hall. His music has been released on Infrequent Seams, Sono Luminus, Starkland, Tundra, New Focus, and Bridge.  

An 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. Working frequently in theater, he and Phyllis Chen won an NY Innovative Theater Award for their score to Sylvia Milo's play The Other Mozart, for which Nathan also received a Drama Desk nomination.  

Also an active percussionist and longtime member of the International Contemporary Ensemble, he performs on all the major stages of NYC and internationally. He appeared as a concerto soloist with the Seattle Symphony, Tokyo Symphony, and Nagoya Philharmonic. Nathan is a graduate of Rice, Yale, and the Rotterdam Conservatory, which he attended as a Fulbright Fellow.

www.nathandavis.com