Evan Ziporyn (b. Chicago, Illinois, December 14, 1959) is an American composer of post-minimalist music with a cross-cultural orientation, drawing equally from classical music, avant-garde, various world music traditions, and jazz. Ziporyn has composed for a wide range of ensembles, including symphony orchestras, wind ensembles, many types of chamber groups, and solo works, sometimes involving electronics. Balinese gamelan, for which he has composed numerous works, has compositions. He is known for his solo performances on clarinet and bass clarinet; additionally, Ziporyn plays gender wayang and other Balinese instruments, saxophones, piano & keyboards, EWI, and Shona mbira. Ziporyn is the Kenan Sahin Distinguished Professor of Music at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as well as director of MIT's Center for Art, Science & Technology (CAST). At MIT he directs Gamelan Galak Tika, an ensemble he founded in 1993, a group of 30 MIT students, staff and community members, devoted to the study and performance of new works for Balinese Gamelan. He is currently a member of the Eviyan Trio, with Czech violinist/vocalist Iva Bittovà and American guitarist Gyan Riley. He has released albums on Cantaloupe, New Albion, New World, Victo, Airplane Ears, and CRI Emergency Music; his works have also been recorded on Naxos, Koch, Innova, and World Village. As a performer, he has recorded for Nonesuch, Sony Classical, and Point Music, among others. He has composed music for a wide range of ensembles worldwide, including Yo-Yo Ma's Silk Road Project, the American Composers Orchestra, the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, the Kronos Quartet, Brooklyn Rider, Ethel, cellist Maya Beiser, the Netherlands Wind Ensemble, the MIT Wind Ensemble, Gamelan Sekar Jaya, Sentieri Selvaggi, Gamelan Salukat, and Gamelan Semara Ratih. Evan Ziporyn was named a 2007 USA Walker Fellow by United States Artists, an arts advocacy foundation dedicated to the support and promotion of America's top living artists. He was born in Chicago, Illinois and now lives in Lexington, Massachusetts with composer Christine Southworth. He is the brother of Brook Ziporyn and Terra Ziporyn Snider, and has two children, Leonardo Ziporyn and Ava Ziporyn.

Career

Ziporyn studied at Eastman, Yale and UC Berkeley with Joseph Schwantner, Martin Bresnick, and Gerard Grisey. He first traveled to Bali in 1981, studying with Madé Lebah, Colin McPhee's 1930s musical informant. He returned on a Fulbright in 1987. While living on the west coast during the 1980s he was a member of Gamelan Sekar Jaya. The three compositions he composed for Sekar Jaya all included western instruments. He performed a clarinet solo at the First Bang on a Can Marathon in New York. His involvement with BOAC continued for 25 years: in 1992 he co-founded the Bang on a Can All-stars (Musical America's 2005 Ensemble of the Year), with whom he toured the globe and premiered over 100 commissioned works, collaborating with Nik Bartsch, Iva Bittova, Don Byron, Ornette Coleman, Brian Eno, Philip Glass, Meredith Monk, Thurston Moore, Terry Riley and Tan Dun. He co-produced their seminal 1996 recording of Brian Eno's Music for Airports, as well as their 2012 Big Beautiful Dark & Scary (2012). He left the group in the fall of that year to form Eviyan with Iva Bittová and Gyan Riley, with whom he now concertizes and records regularly. In the fall of 2013 he founded the Critical Band, a group devoted to the music of the late British composer Steve Martland. Ziporyn joined the MIT faculty in 1990, founding Gamelan Galak Tika there in 1993, and continued a series of compositions for gamelan and western instruments. These include three evening-length works, 2001's ShadowBang, 2004's Oedipus Rex at the American Repertory Theater (Robert Woodruff, director), and 2009's A House in Bali, an opera about composer Colin McPhee, anthropologist Margaret Mead, and artist Walter Spies, which joined Western singers Anne Harley, Marc Molomot and Timur Bekbosunov with Balinese traditional performers Nyoman Catra and Desak Made Suari Laksmi, and Bang on a Can All Stars with a full gamelan ensemble. It received its world premiere in Bali that summer and its New York premiere at BAM Next Wave in October 2010. In 1992 Ziporyn founded the Bang on a Can All Stars, with whom he performed and recorded until 2012. He also was a member of Steve Reich and Musicians, with whom he shared a 1998 Grammy Award for Best Chamber Music Performance. As a clarinetist, Ziporyn recorded the definitive version of Steve Reich's multi-clarinet New York Counterpoint in 1996, sharing in that ensemble's Grammy Award in 1998. In 2001 his solo clarinet CD, This is Not A Clarinet, made Top Ten lists across the country. His compositions have been commissioned by Yo-Yo Ma's Silk Road Ensemble, Kronos Quartet, American Composers Orchestra, Maya Beiser, So Percussion, Wu Man, and the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, with whom he recorded two CDs, Frog's Eye (2006) and Big Grenadilla/Mumbai (2012). His honors include awards from the Massachusetts Cultural Council (2011), The Herb Alpert Foundation (2011), USA Artists Walker Fellowship (2007), MIT's Kepes Prize (2006), the American Academy of Arts and Letters Goddard Lieberson Fellowship (2004), as well as commissions from Meet the Composer/Commissioning Music USA and the Rockefeller MAP Fund. Recordings of his works have been released on Cantaloupe, Sony Classical, New Albion, New World, Koch, Naxos, Innova, and CRI. He is Kenan Sahin Distinguished Professor of Music at MIT. He has also been inaugural director of MIT's new Center for Art Science and Technology and still serves as head of Music and Theater Arts at the Center for Art, Science and Technology (CAST). He is also founder and artistic director of Gamelan Galak Tika, and curator of the MIT Sounding performance series.

Recordings

Works

Works for clarinet / bass clarinet

Works for gamelan

Theater

Orchestra

Wind ensemble

The Ornate Zither and the Nomad Flute (2005) 15' – for solo soprano and wind ensemble

Chamber music

Standard ensembles

Non-standard ensembles

Works for one

Solo piano

Solo pieces for other instruments

Listening

Published musical scores