Suzanne Farrin, composer and musicologist

Suzanne Farrin's music has been performed across the United States and in Europe and South America. Her works have been performed at such venues as Carnegie Weill Hall, Symphony Space, Atlantic Center for the Arts, Festival Nuevo Mundo (Maracaibo), Festival Dancing in Your Head (Minneapolis), LookListen, Philadelphia Fringe Festival, the Ernest Bloch Music Festival, Music in Würzburg, Germany, the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival, Music99 (Cincinnati) and Avant-garde Schwaz (Austria).

Commissions have come from a variety of sources and for combinations as diverse as the Irish bagpipes and string quartet to solo piano pieces and works for vibraphone. Musicians that have performed her work include Tanya Bannister, Steve Mackey, Jason Treuting, Ken Crilly, Antoine Tamestit, Mark Stewart, and David Schotzko. Ensembles such as the Arditti Quartet, So Percussion, Neithermusic, ICE, non|zero and Traces have performed her music on the concert stage.

Suzanne Farrin was born in Ipswich, Massachusetts and currently lives in New York City. Suzanne studied at Yale with composers Martin Bresnick, Ezra Laderman, Joseph Schwantner and Evan Ziporyn. Important influences such as Messiaen, Debussy, Ockeghem and Berio contribute to her musical language along with a love of folk music from the United States and Argentina.

As the chair of a composition and theory department at a college, Suzanne works to bring repertoire to life by integrating theoretical topics with historical context and seeing the art form through a broad-minded cultural lens. Always connecting art to the society in which it is created, her thesis at Yale was entitled, “America in 1970: A look at George Crumb’s Black Angels.”

She currently teaches at the Conservatory of Music at SUNY Purchase, where she is chair of the theory and composition department.

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