Chris Cresswell


The 2015-2016 concert season has proved pivotal for Cresswell with premieres, performances, and artist residencies throughout the United States and Europe. From Dreams, We Emerge, commissioned by Wild Rumpus, premiered at the Berkeley Arts Festival in San Francisco in October 2015. His sound installation, dis-, was commissioned by the National Union of Students as part of the Students Organizing Sustainability and premiered inside the indoor rainforest at The Eden Project in Cornwall, England. In November 2015 his first orchestral work, A horizon intoxicates a body premiered at the Birmingham Conservatoire. In January 2016, he attended the Estalgem Ponta do Sol Artist Residency in Madeira, Portugal, where he created a new work, we study our past to move forward for bass clarinet and electronics. In March 2016, he will have several premieres in Birmingham, England as part of the Frontiers Festival. Just Imagine was written in collaboration with Solihull Music Service and will premiere at Symphony Hall on March 7th. Other premieres include Thoughts of Carolina, written for the London based group, Project Instrumental and Melodies and Memories for prepared soprano saxophone, toy piano, and electronics. Also in March, Holly Roadfeldt will premiere the second of Two Preludes (for Holly) at the University of Nebraska at Kearney. His 2013 acousmatic work, On the Verge, received its UK premiere at the BFE/RMA Student Research Conference in Wales in January 2016 and was selected for the N_SEME event at the University of Oklahoma. His second orchestral work, at the foot of the mountain, will premiere in April 2016 with Sandra Horne and the Birmingham Conservatoire Repertoire Orchestra.

Praised as “versatile and prolific” with music of “ever-changing colors and textures”, Chris Cresswell (b. 1988) is an internationally performed composer, guitarist, songwriter, teaching artist, and arts advocate. As at ease in front of an orchestra as he is behind the mixing board, Cresswell can alternately be found composing new works for artists and ensembles around the country, helping students write their first songs, advocating for the arts with Congressional staffers, or covering the latest Taylor Swift single at a camp fire.

Graduating Magna Cum Laude from Syracuse University in 2011 with a Bachelor’s of Music in Composition, Cresswell has studied with Donald Bohlen, James O. Welsch, Andrew Waggoner, Gregory Mertl, Nicolas Scherzinger, and Zibuokle Martinaityte. In addition to composition, he has studied tuba with Raymond Stewart, Michael Coldren, and William Harris, conducting with James O. Welsch, and classical guitar with Kenneth Meyer. He began pursuing an MMus in Composition at the Birmingham Conservatoire in September 2015 where he studies with Ed Bennett and Errollyn Wallen. He currently lives in Birmingham, UK.

Compositions

From Dreams, We Emerge (2015)
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I began the initial sketch for From Dreams, We Emerge, with a burst of creativity that resulted in three minutes of material that I quite liked. However, after a few months of attempts, I realized I had no idea how to expand or develop this original material. The work, as it exists, became an exploration my inability to complete the initial iteration of the work. The harmonies, gestures, and melodic fragments that occur in this work are all sourced from the first sketches, although the sketches never appear in their original form. Rather, it was in the failure to achieve my intended aims that I was able to create another, unexpected work. This becomes a metaphor for our own lives. As children we dream of who we might become, however it's in the attempts to achieve these dreams, both successful, and unsuccessful, that "we" truly emerge as ourselves an unexpected, often more interesting version of who we set out to be. Commissioned by Wild Rumpus, From Dreams, We Emerge is scored for bass flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano, electric guitar, and electronics. The work explores subtle, shifting electronic textures built from white noise, sampled instruments, and static. The acoustic instruments weave melodic fragments in and out of this atmospheric milieu. The work was complete on September 4, 2015 in Manlius, NY.
Thoughts of Carolina (2016)
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When I started working on the piece that eventually became Thoughts of Carolina, I couldn’t get the song, Carolina in my Mind out of my head. One of the songs James Taylor wrote while living and working in the UK, the lyrics are a nostalgic look at someone’s home. Thoughts of Carolina was the first work I wrote after moving from the US to the UK. Throughout the work, a melodic fragment, reminiscent of an American folk song, appears. Although I did live in North Carolina for a brief time in the summer of 2008, the work is an exploration of nostalgia for home, a remembrance of our individual ‘Carolina’.
we study our past to move forward (2016)
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Written during an artist residency in Madeira, Portugal, we study our past to move forward is a study for bass clarinet and electronics. The electronic parts are built from ‘leftover’ parts of past works. These samples have been remixed, reconstituted, and changed to create the new electronic part. The bass clarinet weaves in and out of these electronic textures, using a variety of extended techniques to build a unique sonic texture. The title refers to the process of sampling and learning: We study our past, our mistakes, our successes, to move forward and create new work.