Louis Karchin

Louis Karchin is the composer of works that have won some of the most prestigious awards in American classical music. He is also active as a conductor and as a longtime faculty member at New York University. Karchin was born on September 8, 1951, in Philadelphia. He attended the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, studying music and graduating in 1973. Karchin went on for a master's (1975) and Ph.D. (1978) degrees at Harvard University, also taking two summer courses as a composition fellow at the Tanglewood Festival. He studied opera conducting with Boris Goldovsky and traveled to Paris for conducting lessons with Leon Barzin in Paris. His composition teachers have included Samuel Adler, Joseph Schwantner, and Leon Kirchner, among others. Karchin is the founder or co-founder of the Harvard Group for New Music, the Chamber Players of the League-ISCM, and the Orchestra of the League of Composers; as the conductor of these groups, he has led world or New York premieres of works by Elliott Carter, Joan Tower, and Charles Wuorinen, among other leading American composers. Karchin is the composer of some 100 works, beginning with the Fantasy for solo violin or viola in 1972, while he was still an undergraduate. His major works include the vocal-instrumental song cycle American Visions (1998), to texts by Yevgeny Yevtushenko; the chamber opera Romulus, (2007), based on a play by Alexandre Dumas, père; and a Chamber Symphony (2009). Karchin's long list of honors and fellowships includes awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Major traditional ensembles and contemporary music groups that have performed Karchin's music include the Louisville Orchestra, the Fort Worth Opera, and Spectrum Sonori (Seoul, South Korea). Karchin is a member of the faculty at New York University, where he established a graduate program in composition. ~ James Manheim