The CCO will perform the orchestral premiere of Elliot Cole’s De Rerum on the Winter Concert on Tuesday February 21, 2012.
Elliot Cole is a composer who also uses video art and computer programming to explore liminal spaces in individual consciousness and cultural memory. Mythology resonates through much of his work: the neo-romantic opera Selkie, which taps into Celtic lore, is being recorded by Divergence Vocal Theater in 2012; The Rake’s Progress and Billy Budd, two collaborative hip-hop operas, have been produced, respectively, by the Metropolis Ensemble at the 2011 MATA Festival, and the Lucerne Festival, where he was a Spotlight Artist in 2011; he has performed his own Babinagar, a song cycle with Afghan roots, in living rooms across Texas and in New York; and he wrote and performed a score to Sophocles’ Electra with the University of Houston in 2010. He toured a suite of songs inspired by Grimm’s folktales around Germany, and he rapped his Fisherman and His Wife, another Grimm’s tale, with the Brentano Quartet, and with the Franklin Quartet as a presenter at the Columbia University Remixing Opera conference in 2011. De Rerum, a hip-hop lecture that synthesizes mythological and materialist cosmogonies, was incubated in an Opera Shop residency in Chicago.
His chamber music has been performed by Psappha (UK), the Metropolis Ensemble, Brentano Quartet, Ensemble ACJW, members of the Lucerne Festival Academy and Lucerne Conservatory, violinist Tema Watstein, harpist Mollie Marcuson, guitarist Flavio Virzi, singers Nicole Rodin, Misha Penton, Caroline Shaw and Alison Fletcher, and the Sissy Eared Mollycoddles. Bassoonist Brad Balliett and bassist Doug Balliett remain primary collaborators. 2012 will see new premieres by the Dither electric guitar quartet, the Flux quartet with bassist Logan Coale, So Percussion, and pianist Conor Hanick.
As a programmer, he is developing a composition tool that blends chance, serialism, ear-driven musicality, and plant-modeling formal grammars. In December 2011, he presented this work with members of the Metropolis Ensemble at The Box (NYC).
He is a graduate student in composition at Princeton, and also holds degrees in music and cognitive linguistics from Rice University.
