Suzanne Farrin

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Suzanne Farrin (Luke Redmond)

Composer Suzanne Farrin’s “appealingly tart” (New York Times) sound has been brought to life by some of the great musicians of today, such the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), Anthony Roth Costanzo, the Arditti Quartet, the American Composers Orchestra under George Manahan, the Locrian Chamber Players, Derek Bermel, Dan Lippel, David Schotzko, So Percussion, Vanessa Perez, Tanya Bannister, Mark Stewart, Antoine Tamestit and Steve Mackey.

Her works have been heard at venues and festivals such as Mostly Mozart, Music Mountain, Look & Listen, the Philadelphia Fringe, Alpenklassik, Music in Würzburg, Theaterforum (Germany), Town Hall Seattle, Carnegie’s Weill Hall, Symphony Space, the Walker Art Center, and in South America at the Festival Nuevo Mundo (Venezuela), and Festival Música y Arte Sonoro (Argentina). She has been supported by organizations such as the Rockefeller Foundation, Meet The Composer, the Wachovia Foundation and Concert Artists Guild. She will compose an operatic monodrama for counter-tenor Anthony Roth Costanzo and ICE as part of the ICElab program in 2014.

Tim Page, the former classical music critic of the Washington Post wrote: “If you can imagine the dense, perfumed chords of Messiaen’s piano music combined with the clangorous, insistent, near-pictorial tone-clusters of Frederic Rzewski’s Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues, you will have some idea of what Farrin’s work sounds like. Yet it transcends its derivations to leave the distinct impression of its own.”

Suzanne Farrin is associate professor of Composition at the State University of New York (SUNY) Purchase. She holds a doctorate in composition from Yale University. "Corpo di Terra," released on New Focus Recordings, is devoted entirely to her music, which may also be heard on the VAI, Signum Classics and Albany Records labels.