A World of Piano: Wayne Horvitz

Recipient of the 2019 American Prize in Composition for Orchestra, composer, pianist, and electronic musician Wayne Horvitz performs extensively throughout Europe, Japan, and North America. He is the leader of and principal composer for The Snowghost Trio, Sweeter Than the Day, The Royal Room Collective Music Ensemble, Brooks/Horvitz/Kim, Electric Circus and The Royal We. He performs regularly as an improviser on both piano and electronics. Past ensembles include The President, The Gravitas Quartet The Horvitz-Morris-Previte Trio, Zony Mash, The New York Composers Orchestra, Ponga, and The Four Plus One Ensemble. Recent releases include “Those Who Remain” (National Sawdust Tracks) and “Cell Walk” featuring duos with bassoonist Sara Schoenbeck (Songlines). In 2016 Horvitz was granted the three yearlong Doris Duke Performing Artists Award.

As a composer, Horvitz has been commissioned by The Kitchen, The Seattle Symphony, The Kronos Quartet, Brooklyn Academy of Music, New World Records, The Seattle Chamber Players, NOCCO, The Seattle Modern Orchestra, The White Oak Dance Company and Earshot Jazz. He has received commissioning grants from Meet the Composer, The National Endowment for the Arts, Seattle Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs, NYSCA, The Mary Flagler Carey Trust and The Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund. He was awarded a Rockefeller MAP grant for the creation of Joe Hill: 16 Actions for Chamber Orchestra and Soloist (2004). His composition “For Piano Alone, In Four Parts” was premiered by pianist Cristina Valdes at the Nordstrom Recital Hall, Seattle in 2009. Horvitz was awarded a MAP grant in 2010 for “55: Music and Dance in Concrete,” a site-specific collaboration with choreographer Yukio Suzuki, video artist Yohei Saito and producer Tucker Martine which premiered in September 2012 at Centrum (WA) and the ASU Museum of Art. His hour-long song cycle “Smokestack Arias,” based on the events of the Everett Massacre, was premiered at ACT Theater in February 2012. He is the recipient of the 2008 NEA American Masterpieces Award for the string quartet “These Hills of Glory.” In 2016, he was the recipient of the Doris Duke Performing Artist Award. In May of 2013 Horvitz’s Royal Room Collective Music Ensemble spent a week in residence at The Stone in NYC. Ben Ratliff of the NY Times wrote, “Mr. Horvitz kept his attention on the band with microscopic focus, quick-cutting between contrasts, putting something free or rippling against a fixity. It held your attention, and when it was perverse, it was just perverse enough.”

In 2014 Horvitz received funding from the Shifting Foundation to write “Some Places Are Forever Afternoon,” a suite of compositions for septet based on eleven poems by the iconic Northwest poet Richard Hugo. A CD was released in 2015 and the work premiered that fall in Washington, Montana, and Oregon – the places Hugo loved and wrote about. The Seattle Symphony premiered “Those Who Remain” for full orchestra on Oct. 29, 2015, conducted by Ludovic Morlot. Horvitz is a 2015 McKnight Visiting Composer Fellow, for his project “21 Pianos,” a site(s)-specific interaction with an extremely out of tune piano and twenty-one towns and cities in Minnesota.

Funded in part by a 2015 MAP grant, “Those Who Remain Pt. 2: Concerto for Installation and Improviser” premiered in January of 2017 at the Seattle Asian Art Museum. The installation is a collaboration with dancer Yohei Saito, video artist Yukio Suzuki and visual artist Barbara Earl Thomas. The music is an electronic score created from samples of “Those Who Remain Pt. 1. In February 2020, in collaboration with the Seattle Opera and the Seattle Modern Orchestra, “188 Sullivan: Charlie Parker’s New York in the ’50s” was premiered by Horvitz with the SMO conducted by Julia Tai, imagining the meeting of Charlie Parker and composer Edgar Varese in a piece that included notated passages, improvising soloists, and interstitial passages of “conduction” directed by the composer.

During the Covid years, Horvitz focused on archival projects, completed and published a book of compositions for beginning and intermediate pianists entitled “Little Pieces for the Piano” and created a new ensemble with vocalist Ayesha Brooks and cellist Ha-Yang Kim. Their premiere concerts were streamed live from Town Hall and The Royal Room and their EP was released on the Lions With Wings label.

As a sideman and collaborator Wayne Horvitz has performed and recorded with Robin Holcomb, Billy Bang, Rinde Eckert, Carla Bley, Marty Ehrlich, Reggie Watts, Alex Guy, Bill Frisell, Fred Frith, Butch Morris, Shelley Hirsch, Skerik, Naomi Siegel, Nels Cline, David Moss, Bobby Previte, George Lewis, Elliott Sharp, Ikue Mori, Kazutoki Umezu, Briggan Krauss, Eyvind Kang, Samantha Boshnack, Christian Marclay, Beth Fleenor, Philip Wilson and John Zorn (Naked City, Cobra, etc.), among others. He has produced recordings for the World Saxophone Quartet, Human Feel, Fontella Bass, Marty Ehrlich, John Adams, Bill Frisell, Robin Holcomb, and Eddie Palmieri. In film and theater, he has collaborated with, among others, Carey Perloff, Yukio Suzuki, Yohei Saito, Crispin Spaeth, Bill Irwin, Gus Van Sant, and Dayna Hanson. “… there’s nobody else out there I hear even attempting to cover some kind of similar range, and do it so convincingly” — All About Jazz