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.
Farrin’s music has been featured at venues such as Theaterforum (Germany), Town Hall Seattle, Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall, Symphony Space, and Wigmore Hall, and festivals including The BBC Proms, Mostly Mozart, Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art, Matrix, Alpenklassik, Music in Würzburg, and BAM’s NextWave, among many others.
In addition to composing, Farrin is a performer of the ondes Martenot, an early electronic instrument created by the engineer Maurice Martenot in France 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 (New York City), Centro de Artes (Buenos Aires), as well as to 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).
Farrin is the Frayda B. Lindemann Chair of Music at Hunter College and The C.U.N.Y. Graduate Center, where she teaches composition. She has been the lead mentor composer for Evolution: Quartet at the Banff Centre since 2021. She holds a doctorate from Yale University.
