Gregory Mertl’s website

“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). Mertl’s 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 (2005, 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 in New York City, Chicago, Boston, Rochester, Honolulu, Baltimore, Florida, Tanglewood, the 1999 International Double Reed Society Conference in Madison, WI, the University of Illinois, the University of Alaska, the Eastman School of Music, 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 challenging, his work communicates with great sincerity. His newest project, a 2007 Barlow Endowment General Commission, is a concerto for piano and winds for pianist Solungga Liu and the University of Minnesota Wind Ensemble, which will be premiered in the fall of 2010. 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. In May 2010 he will present his work in Romania and Hungary on a concert/lecture tour with Kenneth Meyer and in September he will be the VCCA composer fellow  at KOFOMI (Komponistenforum Mittersill) in Salzburg, Austria and will be a returning fellow at I-Park.  Other performances this year include Thailand, China and the States.