Over a career spanning more than four decades composer Louis Karchin has amassed a portfolio of over 90 compositions, appeared as conductor with numerous ensembles, co-founded new music groups including the Chamber Players of the League/ISCM (International Society for Contemporary Music), the Orchestra of the League of Composers, the Washington Square Ensemble, and the Harvard Group for New Music, and overseen the formation of a graduate program in music composition for New York University’s Faculty of Arts & Science.

Acclaimed by critic Andrew Porter in The New Yorker, his works have garnered distinguished honors, including three awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, three National Endowment for the Arts Awards, and Koussevitzky, Barlow, and Fromm commissions.

The debut album of his first opera, Romulus (Naxos 8.669030), was hailed as one of the best recordings of 2011 by Fanfare magazine, and a choice of the month in BBC Music Magazine. His masque Orpheus was previously singled out as one of the ten best new works of 2005 by music critic Alex Ross.

Karchin’s music is published by C.F. Peters Corporation, and the American Composers Alliance, with recordings on the Naxos, Bridge, Albany and New World labels.

Karchin (born Philadelphia, 1951) studied at the Eastman School of Music and Harvard University; he is Professor of Music at New York University. His principal teachers were Samuel Adler, Joseph Schwantner and Fred Lerdahl; and as a Leonard Bernstein Fellow in Composition at Tanglewood, studied with Gunther Schuller and Bruno Maderna. Additional studies included conducting with Leon Barzin in Paris on a Harvard University John Knowles Paine Fellowship, and opera conducting with Boris Goldovsky.