ABOUT

Thomas Schuttenhelm is an American composer and guitarist whose compositions exhibit an exquisite craft and richness of style and are celebrated by many leading artists in contemporary music. His compositions can be heard on numerous recordings and have been performed throughout the country and abroad by artists such as Gregory Walker, Eliot Fisk, Jason Vieaux, Jiji, Gabriele Leite, Trevor Babb, Jordan Dodson, Aaron Larget-Caplan, Danbi Um, Nick Revel, Tom Kraines, Robert Black, Volkan Orhon, Daniel Salazar and the Hartford Festival Orchestra, and pianist Paul Bisaccia. His piano music was featured on the PBS (WGBY- Springfield, WGBH-Boston) special “The Great American Piano.”

His music uses pre-texts and embodied programs to celebrate in allusions to the musical, literary, poetic, visual, and theatrical influences that resonate throughout. His compositions are commonly the result of collaborations with musicians, poets, actors and artists, and the music he writes is often as much ‘about’ the people he collaborates with as it is for them perform. For over a decade he has been performing with soprano Sarah Armstrong and has given collaborative concerts with poet Rafael Oses. Recently he has collaborated and composed works for the Hartford Symphony (Intermix Series), the Hartford Independent Chamber Orchestra, the Adaskin String Trio, the New American Mandolin Ensemble, Duo Montagnard, Duo Orfeo, the Alturas Duo, the Kaleidos World Music Duo, and the Leonard-Smith Duo (including Grammy award winning guitarist Doug Smith), and Michael Nix.

He has worked with numerous choreographers and directors on various productions and was the music director for Shakespeare in Bushnell Park (Hartford, CT) including productions of Comedy of Errors, Measure for Measure, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In 2014 he collaborated with actor/director Tom Schwans for a production of Much Ado About Nothing.

In addition to composing for some of America’s top soloists and ensembles, he is an experienced performer and scholar. He has given lectures at Yale University, Temple University, Cardiff University, University of Newcastle, University of Sussex, University of London, University of Cork (IR), and at the Mannheim Hochschule for Music. In 2007 he was the recipient of a Senior Scholar Fulbright Fellowship to the U.K. (London/Cardiff) and in 2008 he was a British Music Studies fellow at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. In 2011 he delivered a paper for the international conference in Lille (France) on Tracking the Creative Process in Music. He participated in the Britten at 100 at the University of Illinois in October 2013 delivering a talk on ‘Young Apollos: Britten and Tippett’ and delivered a paper on Tippett’s Fifth String Quartet for the North American British Music Association in Las Vegas in August 2014. In 2016-17 he was an Edison Fellow at the Sound Archive in the British Library.

His publications include The Selected Letters of Michael Tippett, published by Faber, and he is the contributing author to an edition on Fernando Sor. He has also authored numerous articles and reviews for the journal Soundboard. In addition, he has contributed to various BBC Radio programs. He is a contributing author for the Tippett Cambridge Companion and his monograph, also for Cambridge University Press, on The Orchestral Music of Michael Tippett: Creative Development and the Compositional Process was published in March 2014. His book Vision and Revision: Tippett’s Fifth String Quartet was published by Taylor & Francis in 2017. He is a guest blogger for the British Library Sound Archives. He was a contributing author to Benjamin Britten in Context (Cambridge University Press). He is currently working on a monograph on the multi-media work Haplomatics, a collaboration between American composer James Sellars and British artist David Hockney, for an exhibition at the New Britain Museum of American Art scheduled to open in 2024.

He has performed electric guitar with the FIREWORKS Ensemble, a contemporary music ensemble; collaborated with the Wellspring Dance Company, a performance art company based in New York; toured with Purple Rock Productions, a diverse theater group, performing on guitar and balalaika; and was a composer-performer member of the Boston Public Works Contemporary Music Series held at Harvard University. He was a member of the Restless Guitar Ensemble and the contemporary music ensemble Live Wires.

Thomas currently lives in Philadelphia where he is the Artistic Director at Network for New Music.