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Biography

Sergio Cervetti composes for orchestra, opera, chamber ensemble, voice, dance and film with a musical vocabulary that ranges from acoustic to electronic. Drawing from an early brush with twelve-tone music and minimalism, his current aesthetic is free and flexible. 

Cervetti graduated from Peabody Institute and studied with Ernst Krenek, Lazlo Halasz, and Stefan Grové.  He went on to win the Caracas Festival prize (Five Episodes) and was subsequently invited by DAAD to be composer-in-residence in Berlin in 1969 where he wrote Lux Lucet in Tenebris which won the Gaudeamus Prize in Holland.  After taking residence in NYC in 1970, he taught at Brooklyn College, worked for Virgil Thomson, and studied electronic music with Vladimir Ussachevsky at Columbia University. The Hay Wain, inspired by the Bosch triptych, established his reputation as a composer of electronic music. Selections are used in Oliver Stone’s film,Natural Born Killers. Premiered in 1972 and recently performed by the Vermont Philharmonic, he conceived“...from the earth...” as a controlled improvisation for a variable number of sustaining instruments which borrows five notes from Mahler’s Das Lied Von Der Erde.

Cervetti joined the faculty of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts in 1972 where he taught music history, composition and choreography until 1997.  His long association with the dance world fostered works—notably 40 Second/42^ndVariations, Wind Devil, Inez de Castro—performed during three seasons of BAM’s Next Wave Festival, at Dance Theater Workshop, Ballet Hispanico, Walker Arts Center, Kennedy Center, Jacob’s Pillow and Sundance. 

For WNYC Radio’s 50^thAnniversary Concert, Cervetti was among noted composers who set John Ashbery’s poem, No Longer Very Clear.  His music’s emotional reach is demonstrated in The Triumph of Death, a song cycle to poetry by Circe Maia for soprano and piano; and inCandombe IIavailable on VMM’s CD,New Music for Orchestra.  It is the orchestration ofCandombe for harpsichord that pays homage to a national dance from his native Uruguay. Nuestras Vidas Son Los Rios, for soprano, string quartet and harpsichord to a text by16^thC Spanish poet Jorge Manrique, premiered in Madrid cosponsored by the American, Canadian and Mexican Embassies in 2003.  Elegy For A Prince, his first opera in collaboration with Elizabeth Esris, was part of New York City Opera’s VOX 2007: Showcasing American Composers.

Cervetti was a panelist for BMI, Creative Artist Program and the Fulbright Commission. His work has support from NEA, NY State Council, Meet the Composer and American Music Center’s Composer Assistance Program.  He is currently collaborating with Esris on a second opera,Otherqueers,based on a character with Asperger’s Syndrome.  He returns this semester to teach electronic music and 20^thC music history at NYU.