Biography
-
Born
1985 (age 40)
-
Born In
Los Angeles, Los Angeles County, California, United States
Born in Los Angeles in 1985, Sean Friar’s first musical love was rock and blues piano improvisation, and piano bad-boy Jerry Lee Lewis his first musical idol. While his focus later shifted toward classical composition, his music still maintains the raucous energy, accessibility and directness of those early musical influences, now along with a diverse and sophisticated classical sensibility. He thrives on composing for both traditional and nontraditional ensembles – recent projects include works for string quartets, medieval dance band, wind quintets, orchestras, laptop orchestras, and a junk car concerto.
His music has been performed throughout the world by such ensembles and performers as the American Composers Orchestra, So Percussion, Matmos, NOW Ensemble, Janus, Ensemble Klang, Newspeak, Psappha, Orkest de Ereprijs, TRANSIT, Line C3 Percussion, the Formalist Quartet, the New Millennium Ensemble, New Music Collective, members of the Bang on a Can All-Stars, and 4-time Grammy-winning percussionist, Glen Velez. Venues featuring his music include Carnegie Hall’s Zankel and Weill Halls, Le Poisson Rouge, the Kitchen, Galapagos, Peak Performances, REDCAT at Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Los Angeles Convention Center, Composers Inc., the MacArthur Foundation, the Gamper Festival of Contemporary Music, the MMix Festival of Interactive Technology, and the Hawaii Institute of Contemporary Music.
Among his honors are the Aaron Copland Award; the First Music Award (New York Youth Symphony) ; the Lee Ettelson Composers Award; three ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Awards; residencies at Copland House and the Apeldoorn, Aspen, Bang on a Can, Bowdoin, and Norfolk music festivals; selection for the American Composers Orchestra’s Playing it UNsafe and ACO/Penn Presents programs; 1st Place in the SCI/ASCAP competition (Regional); an NMC New Works Commission; the Roger Sessions Fellowship and a Perkins Prize at Princeton; the Regents and Lalo Schifrin Scholarships at UCLA; and Grand Prize in the PTA Reflections Contest.
Recordings of his music can be found on New Amsterdam Records (NOW Ensemble’s, Awake, coming out in April), and on TRANSIT Ensemble’s debut album, TRANSIT EP.
He graduated summa cum laude from UCLA in 2007 with B.A.’s in Music and Psychology, where he studied with Paul Chihara, Roger Bourland and Ian Krouse. He currently studies with Steve Mackey, Paul Lanksy, and Dmitri Tymoczko at Princeton, where he is the Harold W. Dodds Honorific Fellow in the Ph.D. program in composition.
Artist descriptions on Last.fm are editable by everyone. Feel free to contribute!
All user-contributed text on this page is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply.
