ABOUT

Eric Nathan’s (b. 1983) music has been called “as diverse as it is arresting” with a “constant vein of ingenuity and expressive depth” (San Francisco Chronicle), “thoughtful and inventive” (The New Yorker), and as “a marvel of musical logic” (Boston Classical Review).

Nathan, a 2013 Rome Prize Fellow and 2014 Guggenheim Fellow, has garnered acclaim internationally through performances by Andris Nelsons and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, National Symphony Orchestra, Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra, Boston Modern Orchestra Project, Scharoun Ensemble Berlin, International Contemporary Ensemble, Boston Symphony Chamber Players, Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, New York Classical Players, JACK Quartet, American Brass Quintet, Ensemble Dal Niente, A Far Cry, and Momenta Quartet, and by performers including vocalists Dawn Upshaw, Lucy Shelton, Tony Arnold, Jessica Rivera, and William Sharp, violinists Jennifer Koh and Stefan Jackiw, trombonist Joseph Alessi, and pianists Gloria Cheng, Gilbert Kalish, and Molly Morkoski. His music has been featured at the New York Philharmonic’s 2014 and 2016 Biennials, Carnegie Hall, Aldeburgh Music Festival, Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music, Aspen Music Festival, MATA Festival, Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, Ravinia Festival Steans Institute, Yellow Barn, 2012 and 2013 World Music Days, Library of Congress, Louvre Museum, Hudson Valley Music Club, Tenri Cultural Institute, and the American Academy in Rome.

Recent projects include three commissions from the Boston Symphony Orchestra, including a chamber work, Why Old Places Matter (2014) for the Boston Symphony Chamber Players, and two orchestral works, the space of a door (2016), that Andris Nelsons and the BSO premiered in November 2016 and commercially released on the Naxos label in 2019, and Concerto for Orchestra (2019), which Nelsons premiered on the 2019-20 season-opening concerts. Nathan’s Opening (2021) for orchestra, co-commissioned by the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra and Serge Koussevitzky Music Foundation at the Library of Congress, was premiered by the MSO and broadcast nationally on a PBS television special in 2021. In 2019, Yellow Barn featured Nathan’s 50-minute dramatic song cycle, Some Favored Nook, created in collaboration with librettist Mark Campbell, on opening night of its 50th anniversary season.

Nathan has received numerous commissions from leading ensembles and institutions such as the New York Philharmonic, Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Barlow Endowment, Fromm Music Foundation, Tanglewood Music Center, Aspen Music Festival, Boston Musica Viva, Chelsea Music Festival, New York Virtuoso Singers, Collage New Music, and University of Chicago’s Grossman Ensemble. He has been honored with a Goddard Lieberson Fellowship and Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Copland House residency, Civitella Ranieri Music Fellowship, ASCAP’s Rudolf Nissim Prize, four ASCAP Morton Gould Awards, BMI’s William Schuman Prize, Aspen Music Festival’s Jacob Druckman Prize, Leonard Bernstein Fellowship from the Tanglewood Music Center, and an Early Career Research Achievement Award from Brown University. Nathan has completed residencies at Yellow Barn, Copland House, and the American Academy in Rome, and is a 2022 fellow at Civitella Ranieri Foundation.

In 2015, Albany Records released a debut CD of Nathan’s solo and chamber music, Multitude, Solitude: Eric Nathan, produced by Grammy-winning producer Judith Sherman. In 2019, Chelsea Music Festival Records released Eric Nathan: Dancing with J.S. Bach, featuring conductor Ken-David Masur in Nathan’s two suites of orchestrations of Bach keyboard works. In 2020, Gil Rose and the Boston Modern Orchestra Project released a portrait album of Nathan’s orchestral and large ensemble music on the BMOP Sound label, and New Focus Recordings released a two-CD set of Missing Words in 2022 (described as “brilliantly original stuff” by Musical America). Nathan’s music has additionally been released on Bridge Records.

A passionate educator and advocate for contemporary composers, Nathan serves as Associate Professor of Music in composition and theory at Brown University's Department of Music. At Brown, he teaches a variety of subjects from composition to popular music history that engage students with and without backgrounds in music. In 2018, he was awarded Brown University's most prestigious award for junior faculty, the Henry Merritt Wriston Fellowship, that recognizes excellence in teaching. He has further served as David S. Josephson Assistant Professor at Brown and Visiting Assistant Professor at Williams College, and has taught composition at the New York Philharmonic’s Composer’s Bridge program and Yellow Barn’s Young Artists Program.

In the 2024-25 season, Nathan assumes the role of Artistic Director of Boston’s Collage New Music, now in its 51st season. Since the 2019-20 season, Nathan has served as Composer-in-Residence with the New England Philharmonic, where he has composed music for the orchestra and assisted in programming its seasons. In the 2023-24 season he assumes the newly created role of Director of the NEP New Music Readings. He previously served as Composer-in-Residence at the 2013 Chelsea Music Festival (New York) and 2013 Chamber Music Campania (Italy). He received his doctorate from Cornell, and holds degrees from Yale (B.A.) and Indiana University (M.M.), as well as a diploma from the Pre-College Division of The Juilliard School. His principal teachers include Claude Baker, Sven-David Sandström and Steven Stucky. Nathan additionally was a composition fellow at Tanglewood, Aspen, Aldeburgh and the Composers Conference.

Learn more at www.ericnathanmusic.com.

ON NATHAN'S MUSIC

"Eric Nathan communicates meaningfully about life by presenting a range of musical emotions and characters in works such as Missing Words and Concerto for Orchestra. From serious to humorous to heartrending to joyful, his compositions are evocative and tell stories. His explorations of different inspirations, images, colors, harmonies, and textures are bound together in logical formal-designs and cohere into personal luminous soundscapes."

- American Academy of Arts and Letters Ceremonial program (2022)

"Eric Nathan’s music, upon first encounter, conveys a compelling and infectious energy: virtuosity in the service of defining musical drama and character. [...] there’s often a thrilling hint of vicarious danger: it’s like watching an escape by a hair’s breadth, a daredevil feat. This music requires of its performers both the willingness and the ability to overcome its challenges in order to immerse the listener in its rich, multifaceted world. [...] 

"Much has gone into the making of Nathan’s distinctive compositional voice. The tactile experience of performing, which involves the resolution of conflicts between notated and improvised music, between technique and expression, is the most direct source of this music’s vitality. The role of the dedicated performer in amplifying and potentially transforming a composed work factors significantly into his approach; with the demands of the music comes a willingness to trust a player to infuse a score with individuality. [...] Nathan also draws on personal, and cultural, experience, including visual art, for his inspiration. As part of his writing process he has recourse to arrays of photographs to catalyze new ideas—not in the sense of illustration, but as a way of focusing creative energy. The Italian sojourn during his Rome Prize year yielded musical responses to the ruins at Paestum, Rome’s multi-leveled archaeology, and other phenomena. The artistically satisfying weight of Nathan’s work comes from these complementary stimuli realized through compositional craft. It wouldn’t be outlandish, in fact, to suggest that in his well-balanced forms and clear, direct musical gestures, Eric Nathan is ultimately a classicist composer with such composers as Stravinsky and Schumann his ancestors."

- Robert Kirzinger
Composer; Boston Symphony Orchestra Assistant Director of Program Publications, Editorial
Liner notes to "Multitude, Solitude: Eric Nathan" (Albany Records)
Read full liner notes here

“Nathan ‘writes music from a quiet but very passionate place,’ Knopp explains. Thanks to the existential topics Some Favored Nook explores, it ‘resonates in such large ways. Yet it’s also so intimate and personal. … It very quietly seeps in. When it was premiered–in a house concert at Yellow Barn–people were weeping at the end.’ ”

- Steven Brown, Arts and Culture Texas (11.12.208)
Quoting Seth Knopp, Artistic Director of Yellow Barn
on “Some Favored Nook” for soprano, baritone and piano
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