# Christopher Stark person laptop\_windows Title: Piano Quartet Commission: 2013 Completed: 2014 Instrumentation: piano quartet Premiere Location: Louisville, Kentucky Premiere Ensemble: LA Piano Quartet Notes: Christopher Stark (b. 1980, St. Ignatius, MT) is a composer of contemporary classical music deeply rooted in the American West. Having spent his formative years in rural western Montana, his music is always seeking to capture the expansive energy of this quintessential American landscape. Stark, whose music the *New York Times* has called, “fetching and colorful,” has been awarded prizes from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Fromm Foundation at Harvard, Chamber Music America, ASCAP, and the Barlow Endowment. Named a 2017 “Rising Star” by the *St. Louis Post-Dispatch*, his music has been performed by such ensembles as Alarm Will Sound, Los Angeles Philharmonic, American Composers Orchestra, BIT20 Ensemble, Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, Momenta Quartet, Unheard-of//Ensemble, No Exit New Music Ensemble, and New Morse Code. In 2012, he was a resident composer at Civitella Ranieri, a fifteenth-century castle in Umbria, Italy, and in June of 2016 he was awarded a residency at Copland House. Recent highlights included performances at the 2016 Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival and at the Whitney Museum of American Art as part of the 2016 NY Phil Biennial. In 2018, he was in residence in Bergen, Norway where he worked with musicians from the Bergen Philharmonic, and in 2020, he was in residence at the Bogliasco Foundation in Italy as the Aaron Copland “Novitiate,” premiered at Sundance in January of 2017 and was theatrically released by Sony Pictures Classics. His debut CD, *Seasonal Music*, was released in 2019 on Bridge Records. - ## Commission Date [2013](/commissiondate/2013) - ## Completion Date [2014](/completiondate/2014) - ## Composer [Stark, Christopher](/composer/stark-christopher) - ## Commissions [Past Commissions](/pastcommisions)