Nathaniel Stookey Narrator
At 17, Nathaniel Stookey was the youngest composer ever commissioned for the San Francisco Symphony’s New and Unusual Music Series. His compositions have since been programmed and commissioned by many of the world’s great orchestras, including the Philadelphia Orchestra, Cleveland Orchestra, Chicago Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic, the National Symphony at the Kennedy Center, Orchestra of St. Luke’s at Carnegie Hall, Toronto Symphony, Hallé Orchestra,and the Sinfonieorchester des Norddeutschen Rundfunks(NDR), among many others.
In 1993, upon graduating from the University of California at Berkeley, Mr. Stookey was awarded the first Hallé Orchestra Composition Fellowship, serving as resident composer under Kent Nagano from 1993 to 1996 and producing a wide range of works including the gamelan-inspired Tame Me and Colliding with Chris, which was a (London) Times Critic’s Choice in 1995. In 1999, Mr. Stookey’s concerto for two violins and string orchestra, Double, was the millennium commission for Music in the Round’s Festival of 999 Years of Music in Sheffield, England. Of the work’s second movement, Remembering, Boston Globe critic David Perkins writes:
The latter is so daringly suspended and slow-building; I kept imagining movie scenes that it might serve as a score: a widow's rediscovery of love letters, a child's slow feverish dying, a couple making love ... and realizing they've fallen out of love. It's that intense.
In 2000, having returned to the United States, Mr. Stookey received a three-year New Residencies Award from Meet The Composer to serve as composer-in-residence with the North Carolina Symphony, The Ciompi Quartet and NPR affiliate WUNC-FM, while simultaneously completing a doctorate at Duke University. That partnership drew national press attention with over sixty performances of five new and three exisiting works, including Big Bang for the opening of Meymandi Hall; Wide as Skies for the centennial of the first manned flight (which was immediately taken up by the Philadelphia Orchestra); and Out of the Everywhere, “a lushly beautiful evocation of the birth of his children,” according to Joshua Kosman of the San Francisco Chronicle.
In 2006, the San Francisco Symphony, with which Mr. Stookey has maintained a close relationship, commissioned, premiered, and recorded The Composer is Dead, a sinister guide to the orchestra with narration by Lemony Snicket. “Having created a furor in the United States” (Hamburger Abendblatt), the work was performed twice back-to-back to sellout crowds at the Toronto Symphony Orchestra’s New Creations Festival, conducted by Peter Oundjian, and has since been performed by over thirty orchestras around the world. Two more vocal-orchestral works followed. In 2008, vocalists Manoel Felciano and Eisa Davis premiered Zipperz: a soaPOPera for two pop singers and orchestra, “a hip and edgy dream come true for any lover of music and the written word,” (SFist.com) with texts by poet Dan Harder. In 2009, Frederica von Stade launched her farewell tour with Mr. Stookey’s Into the Bright Lights, a setting of three of her own texts, in both orchestral and recital versions.
Profiled in the January, 2009 issue of Strings Magazine as a leader among the “Next Generation of String Composers,” Mr. Stookey, himself a violinist, has continued to produce a rich body of chamber music, with works featured on series and festivals in the US, UK, Italy and Germany. All Music Guide describes Mr. Stookey as “a highly imaginative and original talent, particularly as a composer of string quartets.” England’s venerable Lindsay Quartet were champions of Mr. Stookey’s music and featured his String Quartet No.1, dedicated to them, on their final North American tour in 2004. His String Quartet No. 2, Musée Mécanique, commissioned and recorded by the Ciompi Quartet, inspired the Carolina Ballet production Game Over by choreographer Tyler Walters, former principal dancer of the Joffrey Ballet. The Lee Trio has toured extensively worldwide with Above the Thomas Gate and commissioned Piano Trio No. 1 in 2009.
In addition to works for conventional ensembles, Mr. Stookey has continued to attract new audiences with music that challenges the established boundaries of classical music. In 2007, Junkestra, for an orchestra of objects scavenged at the San Francisco dump, drew thousands of listeners to warehouses, public squares, and YouTube before being taken up by the San Francisco Symphony and other classical presenters. That same year, Mr. Stookey contributed original music for string quintet to the The Mars Volta’s Grammy-winning album The Bedlam in Goliath. In 2010, he will create the score for Tony-award winning director John Doyle’s new production of Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco.
Mr. Stookey holds degrees from the University of California at Berkeley and Duke University, where he was a Mary Duke Biddle Fellow and was awarded the Klenz Prize during his first year of graduate study. His principal teachers were Peter Scott Lewis, Donald Erb, Andrew Imbrie, Cindy Cox, George Benjamin, Stephen Jaffe and Scott Lindroth. Concurrently with his orchestral residencies, Mr. Stookey served on the faculties of the University of Sheffield (UK) and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where, from 1998 to 2003, he was artistic director and host of Composers-in-Context, a broadcast new music series for NPR affiliate WUNC-FM.
In 2005, Albany Records released Mr. Stookey’s Music for Strings (1992-2002), featuring The Ciompi Quartet and the strings of the North Carolina Symphony. In 2006, the Chamber Music Partnership released Fling for flute and string quartet as part of its live anthology San Francisco Premieres. A New York Times bestselling picture-book including the San Francisco Symphony’s recording of The Composer is Dead, narrated by Lemony Snicket and conducted by Edwin Outwater, was released in March 2009 by HarperCollins.
Mr. Stookey’s music is published by Associated Music Publishers, with four early works available in print from PRB Productions.
