Elliott Sharp
Photo: Annette Hornischer

Composer, New York

Inga Maren Otto Fellow in Music Composition - Class of Spring 2015

Elliott Sharp is a composer, performer, and producer based in New York City. He has been active in experimental music, improvisation, jazz, and contemporary composition for over three decades. Sharp leads the ensembles Orchestra Carbon, Terraplane, and Tectonics, and has pioneered ways of applying fractal geometry, chaos theory, and genetics to musical composition and interaction. His compositions have been performed by Hilary Hahn, JACK Quartet, Ensemble Modern, Radio-Sinfonie-Orchester Frankfurt, the Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart, and Zeitkratzer, and at such festivals as Tomorrow Festival-Shenzhen, MaerzMusik Berlin, New Music Stockholm, Donaueschingen, Darmstadt, Witten, and Au Printemps. Sharp also directed, wrote, and composed About Us, a science-fiction opera for all-teenage performers commissioned by the Bayerische Staatsoper in Munich, which premiered in July 2010. In 2009, his music-theater work *Binibon* premiered at The Kitchen, and he was featured as a lecteur and composer at Ostrava Music Days. Sharp’s work is the subject of the documentary film Doing The Don’t (2008). Sharp was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2014.

Project Description

"Substance"

During his semester at the Academy, Sharp began to compose the music and text for Substance, an opera about the philosophy and life of Baruch Spinoza within the development of contemporary Western thought. Substance will not be a historical pastiche or a simple dramatization of the excommunication (cherem) of Spinoza. This 75-minute work will instead be a meditation on Spinoza and his legacy, using the vocabulary and syntax that Sharp developed and explored in such compositions as The Boreal, On Corlear’s Hook, Calling, SyndaKit, Proof Of Erdös, and Quarks Swim Free. These musical elements include recombinant streams; chaining, looping, and superimposition of aural “molecules”; chaotic structures resolving to resonant rhythmic patterns; timbral counterpoint; melodies (both micro- and macro-) based on the natural overtone series; acoustic principles used in combining sounds to form “acoustic additive synthesis”; and use of extended techniques to create new virtual instruments. In this work, the orchestration will always be in the service of the drama of the lyrics and sounds of the solo singers and choirs. Special attention will be paid to utilizing the melismatic vocal ornamentation of Sephardic music – crucial when considering Spinoza’s Portuguese heritage and language. Sharp plans to create the text from writings of Spinoza as well as his own extrapolations. Though Substance will be sung primarily in English, key passages will be composed in Portuguese, Ladino, Hebrew, Yiddish, German, Latin, French, and Dutch.

Academy Activities

08 May 15

Current Strategies for Composition and Performance

Composer and multi-instrumentalist Elliott Sharp uses a wide variety of strategies to compose and perform music. His recent string quartet Tranzience is traditionally notated, but makes use of extended techniques and alternative bow materials. The score to his work Sylva Sylvarum was created by proc ...

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