Gregory Mertl: Composer

      “A talent the ear wants to follow wherever it goes” (Boston Globe), Gregory Mertl has garnered commissions from the Tanglewood Music Center (1999), the Rhode Island Philharmonic (2000), the Tarab Cello Ensemble (2001), the Phoenix Symphony (2001), the Wind Ensembles of the Big Ten Universities (2002), the Ostrava Oboe Festival, Czech Republic (2005, 2009) and Kenneth Meyer and the Hanson Institute (2006). His latest work, a piano concerto commissioned by the Barlow Endowment for Solungga Liu and the University of Minnesota Wind Ensemble receives its premiere in fall 2011 and will subsequently be recorded on Innova Records.

    This year he presented work on a concert/lecture tour in Romania and Hungary and as a guest composer at KOFOMI (Komponistenforum Mittersill, Austria) where he had performances by the Austrian contemporary music ensemble "Die Reihe". Previously his music has reached audiences in France, at the Festival du Moulin d’Andé and the France Musique radio station, Belgium, where he placed third at the Harelbeke International Wind Ensemble Composition Competition (2004), and the Czech Republic, where he was featured composer of the Ostrava Oboe Festival in both 2005 and 2009. In Asia, the Tainan Women’s College of Arts and Technology hosted a two-day conference featuring Mertl’s music in May 2005 and lectures and performances followed at several other Taiwanese universities. His music has also been performed in China, Japan, Singapore, Sweden, Canada, Mexico and Brazil.   In the US, it has been heard widely (New York City, Chicago, Boston, Rochester, Honolulu, Baltimore, Tanglewood, Colgate, Northwestern, Yale, and Princeton Universities, and Vermont Public Radio during a two hour program dedicated to his work). In 2007, Open Gate, an ensemble he co-founded, performed an entire evening of his chamber music on a tour that began at the Crane School of Music and Cornell University and culminated at Weill Recital Hall in New York City.

    Born in 1969, Mertl has degrees from Yale University (BA 1991) and the Eastman School of Music (Ph.D. in Music Composition 2005). He has been fulltime Visiting Artist of Composition at the Setnor School of Music at Syracuse University (2008-2010) and has been composer-in-residence at The Ragdale Foundation (August 2008), the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (Fall 2007, Summer and Fall 2009), at the I-Park Artists Enclave in East Haddam, CT (July 2006, May 2008, October and December 2009), and at the Chamber Music Festival of the East at Bennington College in Vermont (2001). He has won major awards such as the Chicago Symphony’s First Hearing Award and a 1998 Tanglewood Composition Fellowship. At Tanglewood, he had the tremendous privilege of studying with Henri Dutilleux and Mauricio Kagel.

    Of primary importance to him is always his music’s relationship to the performer. Although his work is challenging, it strives to communicate with great sincerity. Upcoming works include a cello concerto commissioned by the superb French cellist Xavier Phillips, whose playing is a prime source of inspiration for the work, and a song cycle for vocalist Kirsten Sollek and guitarist Kenneth Meyer. This year he has been a fellow at the Fundación Valparaiso in Spain and at the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation in Taos, New Mexico.