Louis Karchin

Louis Karchin (born September 8, 1951) is an American composer, conductor and educator who has composed over 90 works including unaccompanied and chamber music, symphonic works and opera.

Karchin was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and is Professor of Music at New York University.

He received a B. Mus.

degree from the Eastman School of Music, an M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University, and was twice a Leonard Bernstein Fellow at Tanglewood.

His principal teachers included Samuel Adler, Joseph Schwantner, Leon Kirchner, Earl Kim and Gunther Schuller.

Karchin's music has been recognized by awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (Andrew Imbrie Award, Goddard Lieberson Fellowship, and Walter N. Hinrichsen Award), the National Endowment for the Arts, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation.

He has received commissions from the Serge Koussevitzky, Fromm, and Barlow Foundations.

His 70-minute chamber opera, Romulus, a setting of the Alexandre Dumas, père play, was premiered at the Peter B. Lewis Theatre of the Guggenheim Museum in May, 2007" and subsequently issued on a Naxos CD. Other major works include American Visions, a vocal-instrumental song-cycle on poems of Yevgeny Yevtushenko (New World Records), and a masque, Orpheus, based on a poem by Stanley Kunitz (Albany Records). Of the latter, critic Jules Langert wrote of its San Francisco premiere that “[t]he music seemed in constant flux, creating strong, richly textured sonorities… and brilliant splashes of color; this Orpheus floated on an incandescent fabric of sound.”

Active as a conductor and presenter of new music, Karchin co-founded the Harvard Group for New Music, the Chamber Players of the League-ISCM, and the Orchestra of the League of Composers.

With these groups, he conducted New York or world premieres of works by Elliott Carter, Charles Wuorinen, Joan Tower, Julia Wolfe, Milton Babbitt, Bernard Rands, David Rakowski, Arthur Kreiger, and Jason Treuting, among others.