Sebastian Currier is the 2007 recipient of the prestigious Grawemeyer Award. Heralded as “music with a distinctive voice” by The New York Times and as “lyrical, colorful, firmly rooted in tradition, but absolutely new” by the Washington Post, his music has been performed at major venues worldwide by acclaimed artists and orchestras. His works span both chamber and orchestral genres, and have been performed by ensembles including the Cassatt, Ying, and Kronos string quartets, the New World and San Francisco symphonies, and the New York Philharmonic.
Recent works include Deep-Sky Objects for soprano and ensemble; Fifteen Minutes for flute, harp, and viola; Quanta for orchestra; Flow for chamber sextet; Ringtone Variations for violin and double bass; Cadence, Fugue, Fade for brass quintet; Parallel Worlds for flute and string quartet; and Artificial Memory for chamber ensemble and electronics. In April 2015, Sebastian Currier’s new work for orchestra, Divisions, was premiered by the Seattle Symphony. In addition, May 2015 saw the premieres of Spark, written for the twelve cellos of the Berlin Philharmonic, and Glow, a new solo piano work premiered by Inon Barnatan in London. Recordings include his violin concerto Time Machines with Anne-Sophie Mutter and the New York Philharmonic on Deutsche Grammophon, Next Atlantis with the Ying Quartet on Naxos, and On the Verge from Music from Copland House, featuring his Grawemeyer Award-winning Static, and other chamber works. Anne Midgette for The New York Times said of his Quartetset/Quiet Time album, recorded by the Cassatt Quartet, “…[it] distances the present from the past, causing the listener to think about music itself.”
Currier has received many awards including the Berlin Prize, Rome Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and has held residencies at the MacDowell and Yaddo colonies. He received a Doctor of Musical Arts degree from the Juilliard School; and from 1999-2007 he taught at Columbia University.
Currier makes his debut at Cabrillo with the U.S. Premiere of Quanta on Saturday, August 8th.
