“Lustig is writing music charged with intensity and leavened with intelligence,” wrote the American Academy of Arts and Letters recently in awarding composer Raymond J. Lustig its prestigious Charles Ives Fellowship. Having just completed his MM and DMA at the Juilliard School, Lustig has also won ASCAP’s Rudolf Nissim Prize for his orchestral work UNSTUCK, the Aaron Copland Award from Copland House, the Juilliard Orchestra competition, and the New Juilliard Ensemble competition, and has received commissions from The Academy (A Program of Carnegie Hall, The Juilliard School, and The Weill Music Institute), Metropolis Ensemble, the New York City Ballet's Choreographic Institute, and the American Music Center's Live Music for Dance Project.
Lustig's music has been presented in venues ranging from New York City clubs and galleries to major concert halls and festivals around the world—from Le Poisson Rouge and the Stone to Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall and the École Normale in Paris. Other venues include New York's 92nd Street Y and Symphony Space, the Bowling Green New Music Festival, the Norfolk and Caramoor summer music festivals, the European American Musical Alliance in Paris, the New York City Ballet’s Choreographic Institute, the Juilliard Beyond the Machine Festival, Yale University, Columbia University, Barnard College, Bard College, and Oberlin College and Conservatory.
Performers have included the Juilliard Symphony, the Bowling Green Philharmonia, Metropolis Ensemble, American Opera Projects, the New Juilliard Ensemble, Blind Ear Music, the Da Capo Chamber Players, Avian Music, Orchestra Insonica Duo Noire, Opera on Tap, and counter)induction. Metropolis Ensemble has chosen him as their 2010-2011 Wet Ink Composer, and will build their season's programming around his music.
Also a published researcher in molecular biology, Lustig is deeply inspired by science, nature, and the mind. From his music to his doctoral thesis on psychoacoustics and the communication of archetypal symbols in music, a fascination with the natural world and the inner nature of the mind drives his imagination. His opera-theater work SEMMELWEIS—based on the tragic story of the nineteenth-century obstetrician who discovered the devastating cause of one of history’s worst puerperal fever epidemics—was selected for a recent workshop with director Jonathan Miller and American Opera Projects. He has helped to co-found and develop the Juilliard Weill Cornell Music and Medicine Initiative, a new collaborative project between The Juilliard School and Weill Cornell Medical College that explores the many intersections of music, the sciences, and the healing arts.
His music has been used for dance at the New York City Ballet's Choreographic Institute, the Juilliard School's Composers and Choreographers concert, and Barnard College's Spring Dances concert. He has collaborated with choreographers Yass Hakoshima, Peter Quantz, Melissa Barak, and Brynt Beitman.
Avian Music has recently released its recording of Lustig's You Catching? for ensemble and narrator, and the Bowling Green Philharmonia will be releasing its recording of his UNSTUCK for orchestra in 2010.
Lustig's teachers have included John Corigliano, Robert Beaser, Samuel Adler, Sebastian Currier, Jonathan Kramer, Derek Bermel, Philip Lasser, Pia Gilbert, Conrad Cummings, and Shirish Korde. He lives in New York City with his wife, and teaches at the Juilliard School.
Born in Tokyo and raised in Queens, New York, Lustig received his B.A. from Holy Cross College, where his interests were divided between piano, composition, and biology. He studied cell division, the cell skeleton, and cell polarity at Columbia University and Massachusetts General Hospital before beginning his graduate studies in composition at Juilliard.
