MIT Music Faculty

Music Faculty and Academic Staff

Evan Ziporyn (ez@media.mit.edu), Kenan Sahin Distinguished Professor of Music, Ph.D., UC Berkeley 1989, is a composer/clarinetist whose work draws equally from world and classical music, the avant garde, and jazz. As a member of the Bang On A Can All-stars, he has performed at international venues across the globe, including Lincoln Center, Kennedy Center, London's South Bank Center, the Holland Festival, Australia's Adelaide Festival, Warsaw Festival, September Music Torino, Oslo Ultima Festival, Estonia's NYYD, Festival, New Music Across America, and the Bali International Arts Festival. He has collaborated with Don Byron, Meredith Monk, Henry Threadgill, Nobukazu Takemura, and Cecil Taylor, and co-produced and arranged Bang's acclaimed recording of Brian Eno's "Music for Airports." He has also recorded and toured with Paul Simon, Steve Reich, Arnold Dreyblatt, Matthew Shipp and Tan Dun. In Boston, he is founder and director of the Gamelan Galak Tika, a Balinese music and dance troupe, for whom he has composed numerous works combining gamelan with western instruments and electronics, recorded on two volumes for New World Records. His recent genre-defying solo CD, "This is Not A Clarinet" (Cantaloupe), was featured on "All Things Considered," "The World," and appeared on numerous 2001 Top Ten lists, in both classical and jazz categories. He has also written for Wu Man, the Kronos Quartet, Ethel, Nederlands Blazers, the American Repertory Theater, Boston Modern Orchestra Project, Orkest de Volharding, Gamelan Sekar Jaya, Sarah Cahill, the Arden Trio, and So Percussion. He has received commissions from the Rockefeller Foundation, Meet the Composer, and the New England Foundation for the Arts. His works have been recorded on Sony Classical, Koch, New World, CRI, Innova, and New Tone. Most recently he received the 2004 Goddard Lieberson Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He received his BA from Yale University and his MA and PhD from UC Berkeley, where his principle teachers were Martin Bresnick, Gerard Grisey, and John Blacking. He is Kenan Sahin Distinguished Professor at MIT, where he is also Head of Music and Theater Arts. His puppet opera,"Shadow Bang," a collaboration with Balinese puppeteer I Wayan Wija, was recently released on Cantaloupe Music.

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