Charles Curtis

Cellist Charles Curtis has created a new body of work for solo cello through his collaborations with composers La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela, Alvin Lucier, Éliane Radigue, Christian Wolff, Alison Knowles and Tashi Wada, and filmmakers Raha Raissnia and Jeff Perkins. Rarely-heard works of Terry Jennings, Morton Feldman and Richard Maxfield have also been signposts in Curtis's performing life. Trained at Juilliard with Leonard Rose and Harvey Shapiro, Curtis received the Piatigorsky Prize of the New York Cello Society. Since 2000 Curtis has been Professor of Music at the University of California, San Diego. He is a former member of King Missile.

In recent seasons Curtis has presented solo works of Alvin Lucier at the Auditorium du Louvre and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and premiered new works of Éliane Radigue at the College des Bernardins in Paris; premiered Tashi Wada's Landslide for solo cello and modified tape deck at Issue Project Room; and given performances at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, the Angelica Festival in Bologna, the Ostrava New Music Days, and in Brussels, Metz, Paris, Mexico City, Miami Beach, Athens and Los Angeles. Last summer Curtis led four performances of the music of La Monte Young in honor of Young's 80th birthday at the Dia Art Foundation's Dia:Chelsea space, including the premiere of the original three-hour-long version of Trio for Strings from 1958. In December 2015 he gave the New York premiere of Alvin Lucier's Orpheus Variations for cello and seven winds with Petr Kotik and the SEM Ensemble at Paula Cooper Gallery in New York. In Spring 2016 Curtis performed Éliane Radigue's Naldjorlak at The Kitchen in New York, and presented a series of four concerts with Alvin Lucier in various venues in Marfa, Texas; and Curtis presented concert-length solo performances of the music of early minimalist Terry Jennings at the Courtisane Film Festival in Ghent, the Ateliers Robespierre in Paris, the Regenbogenstadl in Polling, Bavaria, and for Blank Forms at the Swiss Cultural Institute Contemporary Art in New York. In the Fall of 2016 Curtis was featured at the Musikprotokoll in the Steirischer Herbst in Graz, Austria and in a three-day festival of Alvin Lucier’s music at the University of Zürich.