About Evan Ziporyn

Evan Ziporyn (b. 1959) makes music at the crossroads of genre and culture, high and low, west and east. Raised in a musically ecumenical household in Evanston, Illinois, he grew up listening to his father's violin, his grandmother's Yiddish Socialist chorus, his mother's extensive folk & jazz collection, and the sounds of top 40 & Motown on AM radio. At his father's insistence he began violin at age 3, giving it up for piano within weeks. A deep desire to play trumpet was thwarted by his 4th grade bandmaster, and his career as a clarinetist began. He started composing music at age 13 after a visionary high school music teacher, Betty Jacobsen, played him - in rapid succession - Le Sacre, Charles Ives' Quarter Tone Studies, Alvin Lucier's I Am Sitting in A Room, and Steve Reich's Come Out. He soon thereafter began managing his father's small record store, beginning work the same week Bob Dylan's Blood on the Tracks and Earth, Wind & Fire's That's the Way of the World were released. By the end of high school he had composed earnest, undistinguished works for full orchestra, jazz ensemble, the high school musical (YAMO), and his basement prog rock band, Chronosynclastic Infundibulum.

Persisting, he studied composition at Eastman with Joseph Schwantner and at Yale with Robert Moore, David Lewin, and Martin Bresnick, while studying piano with Christopher Oldfather and clarinet with Keith Wilson. As a performer he was banned from all but contemporary works by the Yale Symphony, and instead devoted himself to free jazz and, through the ensemble Sheep's Clothing, post-1960s structured improvisation (Riley, Stockhausen, Cardew, etc.). He also gigged steadily as a jazz clarinetist, specializing in the Sunday brunch. In 1979, working in Festoon's record store, he heard a short recording of traditional Balinese gamelan and had a self-described 'conversion experience.' He spent the following summer in Oakland working with Wayan Suweca and Michael Tenzer in the newly formed Gamelan Sekar Jaya, then traveled to Bali on Yale Murray Fellowship upon graduation in 1981. There he studied gender wayang, the music of the shadow play, with Wayan Suweca, and pelegongan drumming with I Madé Lebah, who had previously been Colin McPhee's driver and chief musical informant in the 1930s.

Returning to the US after traveling through Asia & Africa, he received his MA & PhD in composition from UC Berkeley, studying with Gerard Grisey and Andrew Imbrie, and continuing his involvement with Sekar Jaya, eventually becoming their music director in 1989. He joined the group on two concert tours of Bali, including their precedent-setting 1985 appearance at the Bali Arts Festival, the first ever by a western ensemble. He returned to Bali on a Fulbright Fellowship in 1987, learning the Sukawati gender wayang repertoire from I Wayan Loceng. During this period he also completed his first paid commission, for which he received $300, spending the entire sum on the miniature Casio keyboard on which he wrote the piece.

Earlier that summer, he was invited back to New York to perform a solo clarinet work at a small new music festival, whimsically titled the First Annual Bang on a Can Marathon. Returning to the US in 1988, he began an ongoing involvement with Bang on a Can that continues to this day. He has performed his own work on every BOAC New York marathon since, as well as taking part in dozens of seminal performances of works by Louis Andriessen, Morton Feldman, Michael Gordon, David Lang, Steve Reich, Julia Wolfe, and many other major contemporary composers. In 1992 he became a founding member of the Bang on a Can All-stars (Musical America's 2005 Ensemble of the Year), with whom he has recorded for numerous labels including Sony Classical, Nonesuch, Point Music, and Cantaloupe, performed at major venues in several dozen countries (from the 2000 Sidney Olympics & 2009 Beijing Festival to the caves of Lanzarote & non-electrified recital halls in Samarkand & Bukhara). With the All-stars he has premiered over one hundred new works specifically written for the group, from composers ranging from Ornette Coleman to Ralph Shapey, from Tan Dun to Thurston Moore. Also with the group he has collaborated with some of the worlds most creative and vital living musicians, including Nik Bartsch, Iva Bittova, Don Byron, Bryce Dessner, Brian Eno, Philip Glass, Meredith Monk, Kyaw-kyaw Naing, Terry Riley, Cecil Taylor, Henry Threadgill, and Wu Man. Their latest recording, Steve Reich's 2x5, was recently released on Nonesuch: the All-stars premiered the work at the Manchester Festival in 2009, opening for Kraftwerk in a bicycle stadium.

In 1990, Ziporyn joined the MIT faculty, founding Gamelan Galak Tika as a student group there in 1993. He also began composing an ongoing series of groundbreaking cross-cultural works, imbuing his work for western instruments with doses of Balinese sensibility, and in turn combining gamelan with saxophones, guitars, electronics, Chinese and African instruments, and full orchestra. These include 1994's Tire Fire (described by the New York Times as 'an exuberant blast of metal fireworks'), 2003's Ngaben (a memorial for the Bali bombings of that same year) and 2006's Bayu Sabda Idep. He also incorporated Balinese theatrical practice – dance, vocals, and puppet mastery – into two evening-length theater works, 2001's ShadowBang (a collaboration between Bang on a Can and Balinese puppet master I Wayan Wija, and the centerpiece of the 2006 Amsterdam Grachtenfest), and 2004's Oedipus Rex, directed by Robert Woodruff at the American Repertory Theater. These pieces led to his 2009 opera, A House in Bali, based on Colin McPhee's memoir, which brought western-trained singers together with Balinese traditional performers, and the All-stars together with Gamelan Salukat, an ensemble of teenage boys from Pengosekan Village, Bali. It received its world premiere outside the Ubud Palace that summer & it's American premiere at Zellerbach Hall on the UC Berkeley campus that falland was performed in October 2010 at the Gilman Opera House, as part of the BAM Next Wave Festival.

Concurrently, Ziporyn continued to develop his own distinctive techniques and repertoire on the clarinet and bass clarinet. He recorded the definitive version of Steve Reich's multi-clarinet New York Counterpoint in 1996, as well as sharing in the Reich Ensemble's Grammy for Music for 18 Musicians in 1998. In 2001 he released his first solo clarinet CD, This is Not A Clarinet, which was featured on NPR's All Things Considered (on September 10, 2001) and made numerous Top Ten lists across the country. He continues to concertize as a soloist, as well as composing & performing concerti for bass clarinet and orchestra for the Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP), the American Composers Orchestra, and the MIT Wind Ensemble.

As a composer, his works have also been commissioned and performed by Yo-yo Ma's Silk Road Project, Kronos Quartet, Orkest de Volharding, Maya Beiser, So Percussion, Gamelan Semara Ratih, and the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, with whom he recorded his 2006 orchestral CD, Frog's Eye. In recognition of his accomplishments, he received the 2007 USA Artists Walker Award and the 2004 American Academy of Arts and Letters Goddard Lieberson Fellowship. Recordings of his works have also been released on Cantaloupe, Sony Classical, New Albion, New World, Koch, Innova, and CRI.

He is Kenan Sahin Distinguished Professor of Music at MIT, lives in Lexington, Massachusetts with Christine Southworth, and has two children, Leonardo (18) and Ava (11).