A composer who cares if you listen
American composer Nathan Scalise creates music that is deeply tied to place, story, and emotion by blending the rhythmic drive and direct expression of vernacular traditions with the performance techniques and complexities of the concert tradition. His music has been performed by professional artists including Contemporaneous, the Momenta Quartet, Andrew Fuchs, Hub New Music, Jordan Bowman, the Ajax Quartet, 3G Percussion, Jacqueline Horner-Kwiatek, Modern Medieval Trio, Dolce Suono Trio (2017 Steven Stucky Young Composers Competition Winner), Out of Bounds Ensemble, Contemporary Columbus, Opera Elect, Angela Collier-Reynolds (selected through Fifteen-Minutes of Fame), Paul Neebe, and Orchestra 2001, and at festivals including Fresh Inc, NYC SongSLAM (2019 1st prize), Wintergreen Summer Music Festival and Academy, Connecticut Summerfest, Charlotte New Music Festival, and Space City New Music Festival. Always interested in composing for contexts outside the classical concert hall, his works also include opera, musical theater, jazz ensemble pieces, and church music.
In addition to compositional activities, he performs frequently as a trombonist, pianist, and drummer. A native of Brewster, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod, Nathan holds a DMA in Composition from the Hartt School, where he studied with Gilda Lyons, Robert Carl, and Nathalie Joachim, an MM in Composition from Binghamton University, where he studied composition with Daniel Thomas Davis and trombone with Don Robertson, as well as BAs in Music and Economics from Swarthmore College, where he studied composition with Gerald Levinson, trombone with Paul Arbogast, and piano with Hans Lüdemann. He has previously served as an adjunct professor at Binghamton University, a teaching fellow in music theory at the Hartt School, and is currently an adjunct music theory teacher at Choate Rosemary Hall. When not doing something musical, he is likely to be running, playing basketball, or cheering loudly for Boston sports teams.
Reach him at nathan.scalise@gmail.com
Photo Credit: Barbara Wolfe