Christopher Trapani

Christopher Trapani weaves American and European stylistic strands into a personal aesthetic that defies easy classification. Snippets of Delta Blues, Appalachian folk, dance band foxtrots, shoegaze guitar effects, and Turkish makam can be heard alongside spectral swells and meandering canons. As in Christopher’s hometown of New Orleans, diverse traditions coexist and intermingle, swirled into a rich melting pot — an effect described by Paul Griffiths as “a music of routes without roots, or one where the roots lift into the air, and we do not know whether what lies below them is New Orleans or Istanbul.”

Christopher earned a Bachelor’s degree from Harvard, then spent most of his twenties overseas: a year in London, working on a Master’s degree at the Royal College of Music with Julian Anderson; a year in Istanbul, studying microtonality in Ottoman music on a Fulbright grant; and seven years in Paris, where he studied with Philippe Leroux and worked at IRCAM. Christopher earned a doctorate in 2017 from Columbia University in New York City, where he studied with Tristan Murail, George Lewis, Georg Friedrich Haas, and Fred Lerdahl. He is currently Assistant Professor of Electronic Music and Digital Media at Louisiana State University.

Christopher Trapani maintains an active career in the United States, the UK, and in Continental Europe. Recent commissions have come from Klangforum Wien, Ensemble Modern, JACK Quartet, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, and Radio France, and his works have been heard at Carnegie Hall, Southbank Centre, Wiener Konzerthaus, Festival Présences, Ruhrtriennale, Ravenna Festival, Ultraschall Festival, IRCAM, and Wigmore Hall.

Christopher is a Guggenheim Fellow (2019) and a winner of the Rome Prize (2016). He has held fellowships at Akademie Schloss Solitude, Camargo Foundation, and the Bogliasco Foundation. Christopher is the winner of the 2007 Gaudeamus Prize, the 2020 Barlow Prize, and has been awarded commissions from the Koussevitzky Foundation, the Fromm Foundation, the Ernst von Siemens Foundation, and Chamber Music America.

Waterlines, his debut portrait CD, featuring performances by Talea Ensemble, JACK Quartet, and others, was released on New Focus Recordings in 2018, followed by Horizontal Drift in 2022, a collection of solo works for unusual instruments. A second recording of Waterlines by ICTUS Ensemble in Brussels was released in 2020.

Projects for 2024 include a Carnegie Hall performance by Ensemble Modern on their first visit to the US in a decade, along with the premiere of Noise Uprising, a 90-minute cycle for two voices, four guitarists, and electronics. New World Records will release a recording in the Fall, featuring the voices of Sofia Jernberg and Sophia Burgos, and the electric guitar quartet Zwerm – with whom Trapani himself plays lap steel guitar, Algerian mandole, microtonal Telecaster, and other assorted odd instruments.

Christopher splits his time between New Orleans and his European base in Palermo, Sicily.