Bio
photo by Gerry Szymanski
Composer Andrew McManus (b. 1985) is a doctoral student at the University of Chicago, where he studies with Augusta Read Thomas, Marta Ptaszynska and Shulamit Ran. He holds a Master of Arts degree from the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, NY, where he studied with Robert Morris, Ricardo Zohn-Muldoon, Allan Schindler and Howard Hanson Visiting Professor Yehudi Wyner. He is also a graduate of Yale University in New Haven, CT, where he studied with Kathryn Alexander, John Halle and Matthew Suttor. In May 2010 eighth blackbird premiered his The Generator (2010) as part of the Contempo Chamber Players’ Tomorrow’s Music Today concert series at the University of Chicago. His orchestral work Identity (2008) was premiered by the Minnesota Orchestra under conductor Osmo Vänskä as part of the 2008 Minnesota Orchestra Composer Institute. Identity was also the winner of a 2009 BMI Student Composer Award. Other works have been performed at the MusicX, Norfolk Contemporary Music and Aries Composers Festivals. In January 2011, The Concerto of Deliverance was featured in a reading session by the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra. His music often explores the expressive possibilities of modernist theoretical techniques, as well as the intersection of acoustic and electronic music. Recent works include Finnegan’s Logic (2008-2009) for large ensemble and electronics, which engages the dream world of James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake; Orbits (2009) for viola and piano, which explores metric modulations and multiple simultaneous tempos, and The Concerto of Deliverance (2010) for orchestra, based on Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged and its philosophical ideas.
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