Music Department Events

Suzanne Farrin is a composer whose works have been performed around the world. Anthony Tommasini of the New York Times called her first opera, dolce la morte, a work of “shattering honesty.” Her debut recording, Corpo di Terra, was described in Timeout Chicago, “like field recordings from inside the cerebral cortex.” Recent commissions include works for The Parker Quartet, Talea, The Library of Congress, Sō Percussion, JACK Quartet, and The International Contemporary Ensemble. She was a 2018 Rome Prize Winner and a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow in Composition.

Her music has been featured at venues and festivals including The BBC Proms, Mostly Mozart, The Gothenburg Art Biennial, Matrix, Alpenklassik, Music in Würzburg, BAM NextWave, Theaterforum (Germany), Town Hall Seattle, Carnegie’s Weill Hall, Symphony Space, Wigmore Hall, The National Theater of Tiachung, Taiwan, Ojai Festival, among many others.

In addition to composing, Suzanne is a performer of the ondes Martenot, an early electronic instrument created by the engineer Maurice Martenot in the 1920s as a response to the simultaneous destruction and technological advances of WWI. Her life as an interpreter on the instrument has taken her to venues such as the Abrons Arts Center in NYC, Centro de Artes in Buenos Aires, as well as film and television. She has performed in film scores such as Chicuarotes (Gael Garcia Bernal, director), Sade Ma’bar/Blockage (Mohsen Gharaie, director), and USERS (Natalia Almada, director), which was featured at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival. She appears as herself in an episode of the Amazon series Mozart in the Jungle (Roman Coppola, director).

Suzanne is the Frayda B. Lindemann Chair of Music at Hunter College and The C.U.N.Y. Graduate Center, where she teaches and directs the Ph.D. program in composition. She holds a doctorate in from Yale University. Her next opera, Macabéa, based on a book by Clarice Lispector, will be premiered at the Theatro São Pedro in São Paolo, Brazil in 2025 and is supported by the Siemens Foundation and the Consulate General of Brazil in New York. She is a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow and 2018 Rome Prize Winner.

Sponsored by The Elizabeth Nason Distinguished Women Visitors Fund and The Christopher U. Light Lectureship.  The Christopher U. Light Lectureship in Music was created in 1985 (1985 for Art and 1984 for Literature) by Mr. Light, Carelton Class of 1958. Among his many interests, Mr. Light is a freelance writer and composer, a record producer and a musician with interests in computers and music.