Tyshawn Sorey

Newark-born composer and multi-instrumentalist Tyshawn Sorey is a composer and musician who occupies a unique space in and between spontaneous and formal composition. An artist whose work has proven impossible to categorize, he has maintained a lifelong interest in establishing an alternative musical model that celebrates genre mobility both as an artistic ideal and a compositional attitude.

Over the last several years, Sorey’s major orchestral works have included For George Lewis (Alarm Will Sound); For Roscoe Mitchell (premiered by the Seattle Symphony with Seth Parker Woods); For Marcos Balter (premiered by Detroit Symphony and the New Jersey Symphony with Jennifer Koh); and For Olly Wilson (premiered by San Francisco Contemporary Music Players and Ensemble Intercontemporain). He created song cycles for Opera Philadelphia with John Holiday and Los Angeles Opera with Amanda Lynn Bottoms and filmmaker Nadia Hallgren. Honoring his recent work, The New York Times deemed him “the composer of the year” for 2020. With director Peter Sellars, soprano Julia Bullock, and the International Contemporary Ensemble, Sorey composed Perle Noire: Meditations for Josephine, which has been staged by Ojai Festival, DACAMERA, and Metropolitan Museum of Art (on the grand staircase in the entry hall). The piece will travel to the Dutch National Opera and Theatre du Chatelet in 2023. In addition, he has written works for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, PRISM Quartet, cellist Matt Haimovitz, The Crossing, JACK Quartet, TAK Ensemble, the McGill-McHale Trio, bass-baritone Davóne Tines, the Louisville Orchestra, and tenor Lawrence Brownlee with Opera Philadelphia in partnership with Carnegie Hall.

Sorey has recently performed and recorded with his trios and sextet and has toured extensively with Vijay Iyer and Linda May Han Oh following the release of their critically acclaimed ECM recording Uneasy. He has collaborated with such performers as John Zorn, Roscoe Mitchell, Muhal Richard Abrams, Wadada Leo Smith, Joe Lovano, Bill Frisell, Marilyn Crispell, George Lewis, Claire Chase, Bill Laswell, Paula Matthusen, Steve Lehman, Matana Roberts, Jason Moran, Evan Parker, Ikue Mori, Anthony Braxton, and Myra Melford, among many others. He has also released numerous critically acclaimed titles of his own that feature his work as a composer, co-composer, improviser, multi-instrumentalist, and conceptualist. Such recordings have been released on Firehouse 12 Records, Pi Recordings, Cedille Records, New Focus Recordings, ECM Records, and Cantaloupe Music.

Sorey is currently Presidential Assistant Professor of Music at the University of Pennsylvania and composer-in-residence at Opera Philadelphia. He was also recently the Blodgett Artist in Residence at Harvard University. He was named a 2017 MacArthur fellow and a 2018 United States Artists Fellow. Among other awards and honors he has received include composition grants from the Shifting Foundation, Fromm Foundation, Van Lier Fellowship, and the Jerome Foundation, as well as the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation’s Impact Award and a Goddard Lieberson Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

In 2022, Sorey's composition, Monochromatic LIght (Afterlife), commissioned for the fiftieth anniversary of Rothko Chapel was premiered there, followed by a staged version directed by Peter Sellars at the Park Avenue Armory in New York.  In 2023 his saxophone concerto, Adagio (For Wadada Leo Smith) was premiered at the Lucerne Festival and was also performed by the Atlanta Symphony.