Percussionist Dr. Christopher Graham is a new music specialist living and working in New York City. Chris has worked and performed with notable ensembles such as Newband, Ensemble Mise-en, Talea Ensemble, Talujon Percussion, Mantra Percussion, and is a founding member and director of Hypercube and Iktus Percussion. Chris has toured throughout the United States, Canada, South America, Europe, and Asia. Additionally playing a variety of musical styles, he performs often in New York City at venues such as National Sawdust, (Le)Poisson Rouge, Merkin Hall, Issue Project Room, Roulette, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Described by The New Yorker as an, “authoritative of percussion”, Chris is at the forefront of championing new works for the advant-garde, commissioning and premiering new pieces by established composers such as Charles Wuorinen, John Luther Adams, and Michael Gordon. He has recorded for New Focus Recordings, New Amsterdam Records, Cantaloupe Music, Kotekan Records, LockStep Records, and performs and records often for the American Composers Alliance and American Promotion of New Music organizations.
As a music educator, Chris has conducted and participated in masterclasses and workshops at over 50 universities and colleges throughout the United States and Europe. He is the Co-Head of percussion studies at SUNY Purchase College, and is on the music faculty for the Special Music School, Lucy Music School, and Face The Music programs at the Kaufman Music Center, where he provides private music instruction and directs various ensembles. Former teachers include, Brian Kendrick, Herbert Flower, Dominic Donato, Raymond DesRoches, Tom Kolor, Joseph Pereira, and Eduardo Leandro. He has a B.M. from SUNY Purchase, M.M. and D.M.A from Stony Brook University. He is sponsored by Marimba One, Black Swamp Percussion, and Vic Firth mallets.
"Rockmaker's writing is both traditionally disciplined and unexpectedly inventive..." -New Music Connoisseur
Jody Rockmaker (born 1961, New York City) received his Ph.D. in Composition from Princeton University. He has studied at the Manhattan School of Music, New England Conservatory and the Hochschule für Musik und darstellende Kunst in Vienna. His principal teachers have been Erich Urbanner, Edward T. Cone, Milton Babbitt, Claudio Spies, Malcolm Peyton and Miriam Gideon.
Dr. Rockmaker is the recipient of numerous awards including a Barlow Endowment Commission, Fulbright Grant, two BMI Awards for Young Composers, an ASCAP Grant, the George Whitefield Chadwick Medal from New England Conservatory, and a National Orchestral Association Orchestral Reading Fellowship. He has held residencies at the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, the Djerassi Resident Artists Program and Villa Montalvo, and has been a Composition Fellow at the Tanglewood Music Center. He taught at Stanford University and is currently an Associate Professor at Arizona State University School of Music.
Gizmo - Jody Rockmaker
Recorded at home in New York, NY, August 2020
Chris Graham, percussion
Mastered by Robert Scott Thompson, Aucourant Records.
Property of Shelter Recording Project, American Composers Alliance.
