BRAD BALLIETT / COMPOSER, PERFORMER

New York City-based musician Brad Balliett maintains an active and busy schedule as a composer, bassoonist, speaker, teaching artist, and poet.

Principal bassoon of the Princeton Symphony Orchestra, Brad is an artistic director for the chamber music collective Decoda (Affiliate Ensemble of Carnegie Hall), and performs with the leading new music groups in New York, including Signal, Metropolis Ensemble, and Deviant Septet. Brad has also performed with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, Houston Symphony, Metropolitan Opera Musicians, New York City Ballet, International Contemporary Ensemble, and Hartford Symphony Orchestra. Festival performances include Marlboro, Tanglewood, June in Buffalo, Newport Jazz Festival, Festspiele Mecklenburg-Vorpommen, and the Lucerne Festival. As a composer, Brad has witnessed and participated in premieres of his orchestral, chamber, choral, opera, and incidental music. Recent commissions have come from Carnegie Hall, Cecelia Chorus, Metropolis Ensemble, Notre Dame University, Experiential Orchestra, Cantori New York, and the Boston Youth Symphony Orchestra Wind Ensemble. Brad has also composed dozens of sonnet cycles.

Brad is a member of the band Oracle Hysterical, with whom he has co-composed and recorded two song cycle albums to be released in 2017. The band has composed numerous large-scale works, including evening-length collaborations with A Far Cry, the Chicago Composer's Orchestra, and the Lucerne Festival Academy, with whom the band was the Spotlight Artist in composition in 2011. With his twin brother, Doug, Brad hosts a weekly radio show on WQXR’s Q2 Music (The Brothers Balliett), curates a monthly concert series at Spectrum in the Lower East Side, is on faculty at The Juilliard School (Evening Division), and has presented lectures for Carnegie Hall. As a teaching artist, Brad regularly leads composition and song-writing workshops in prisons, schools, hospitals, and homeless shelters, both for Carnegie Hall and their Affiliate Ensemble, Decoda. He is a faculty member for Musicambia at Sing Sing Correctional Facility. Brad graduated summa cum laude from Harvard University in 2005, and holds an MM from Rice University.