BIO
William Brittelle (he/him) is a Brooklyn-based GRAMMY-winning producer, GRAMMY-nominated composer and a creator of hyper-text and multimedia. An avid collaborator, Brittelle has worked with a number of artists across multiple disciplines, including Roomful of Teeth, Justin Vernon (Bon Iver), Bryce Dessner (The National), Son Lux, Oneohtrix Point Never, A Far Cry, Lower Dens, Duran Duran, Wye Oak, Dirty Projectors, Kanye West, and the Seattle, Baltimore, Indianapolis, Alabama, Grand Rapids and North Carolina Symphony Orchestras, the Basel Sinfonietta, the Nu Deco Ensemble, and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. His most recent full-length LP entitled Spiritual America featuring Wye Oak, the Metropolis Ensemble, and the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, was released by Nonesuch/New Amsterdam in 2019. Prior releases were profiled on NPR's All Things Considered and in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, MUSO, The Nation, and The New Yorker.
Brittelle's work has been presented at venues across the world, including the Hollywood Bowl and Disney Hall in Los Angeles, Lincoln Center and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Kennedy Center, Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires, Da Camera in Houston, Seattle's Town Hall, the Kahserne in Switzerland, the Freemantle Arts Center in Perth, and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Recently, his worked has focused increasingly on complex collaborative networks and interlinked text and multi-media, a trend culminating in the launch of Eternal September, a vast digital alternate reality artistic platform developed in partnership with the Brown Arts Institute and the Metropolis Ensemble. Additional partners include the Cincinnati Symphony, the Walker Art Center, Liquid Music, and the Great Northern Festival. (More info and full list of collaborating artists here.) Additional presenters of Brittelle's multimedia works include the Palm Springs Art Museum, Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Chelsea Art Museum.
Increasingly active as a producer, upcoming and recent projects include albums with Alex Temple/Julia Holter/Spektral Quartet, Metropolis Ensemble/Wye Oak, composer Missy Mazzoli, vocalist/percussionist Jodie Landau, the string ensemble Owls, singer/composer Aditya Prakash, movement and voice ensemble Constellation Chor, and keyboardist Erika Dohi. Roomful of Teeth's 2023 album Rough Magic garnered Brittelle a GRAMMY award as producer (BEST SMALL ENSEMBLE PERFORMANCE) and a nomination as composer (BEST CONTEMPORARY CLASSICAL COMPOSITION).
Along with composers Judd Greenstein and Sarah Kirkland Snider, Brittelle is the co-founder and co-artistic director of New Amsterdam Records, a GRAMMY-winning non-profit pro-artist record label and artist service organization with a catalog of over 120 releases. He also serves as house producer for Figureight Recordings, a renowned Brooklyn-based studio owned and founded by Shahzad Ismaily. Brittelle has been the recipient of grants and awards from the National Endowment of the Arts, American Music Center, American Composers Forum, the Jerome Foundation, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, NYSCA, and ASCAP. He formerly served on the faculty of The New School in New York City, developing and teaching courses in Genre-fluid Music and the Ethos of Punk, and has guest lectured at Juilliard, the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music, Duke University, Vanderbilt University, University of Wisconsin, University of Maryland, Oberlin, USC, and the Cork Academy of Music. In 2022, Brittelle was named an ongoing member of the Brown Arts Institute's Artistic Innovators Collective.
CONTACT
management, press, label, scores, direct
SELECTED PRESS
“…a mercurial artist whose oeuvre embraces post-punk flamboyance, chamber music elegance, and much more.”— The New Yorker
"One of the most astonishing releases of 2019" - Brian Howe, INDY Week
Feature story on Popmatters
Extended interview on Irish National Radio's Mystery Train w/ John Kelly.
Feature interview in Japanese mag Ecrit-O
Featured segment on Wisconsin Public Radio's syndicated program "To the Best of our Knowledge".
“To say his mercurial material dazzles is an understatement; transfixes might be more accurate.” - Textura
Feature in The Nation: "Over the past decade, Brittelle has been drawing from his varied experiences in classical music, punk rock, and electronica to produce silo-bombing music that is at once free-ranging, formally adventurous, unconventionally beautiful, and a joyful thrill to experience."
"That's important, as Spiritual America is a strikingly emotional piece of music." - Star Tribune
Feature story on MPR News
"If there exists a canon of contemporary classical, I'd venture to say that William Brittelle's “Future Shock” ought to be on it." - Popmatters
Loving the Chambered Nautilus feature on NPR's All Things Considered
"[Television Landscape] evokes an earthquake-weather mood along a painterly musical landscape of searing rock, shaded by tonal passages of strings and French horns, flutes and, in one emotional spot, a children's choir. You might wonder if Jane's Addiction had discovered the soul of Debussy." - The Los Angeles Times
"William Brittelle creates classical music that hip classical consumers ought to be listening to." -Gramophone
New York Times Sunday Arts & Leisure feature article on Television Landscape
"…the music was substantial: a riotous shotgun wedding of rich orchestrations and complex arrangements with the rock-oriented pleasures of flamboyant posturing and excessive volume. Where the two sides came closest together the results were irresistible." - The New York Times
"William Brittelle is creating a body of work that has no precedent, and marks him as a one of the most promising heirs of the vital American maverick tradition." - Classical TV
"This is a fast, fun, freedom-fuelled flurry of a record… William Brittelle is clearly the Dan Deacon of contemporary classical." - MUSO
"Amid the Minotaurs", by composer and New Amsterdam co-founder William Brittelle, begins as an ersatz jazz madrigal and ends with a gloriously ludicrous, Lita Ford-style power ballad finale. As a composer, Brittelle is heroically unafraid of flirting and occasionally consummating the relationship with bad taste, and "Amid The Minotaurs", like his 2010 AOR prog-rock suite Television Landscape, has the nervy throwdown feel of an aesthetic dare. - Pitchfork
"The Color of Rain" from Television Landscape featured in The Believer Magazine's annual music issue.
"Brittelle traverses electronica, prog rock, neo-classical, avant-garde, alt rock, and more on Television Landscape. But anyone can — and these days, often does — make a record stacked high with eclectic influences; the real masterstroke here is the way Brittelle makes all these elements flow together as though they'd always been part of the same musical universe, and he achieves a surprising degree of easiness on the ear with this deceptively dense, conceptually complex piece of work.” - All Music Guide
"Television Landscape is all the things one expects from an epic art-rock album: expansive, anthemic, all-encompassing, shot through with raw emotion." - eMusic (from a Spotlight Interview by Jayson Greene)
"Brittelle channels Prince's heavenly wail, addresses a love song to Sheena Easton and stumbles across teenagers smoking American Spirits and singing The Smiths "Girlfriend in a Coma". Melodic, tight, and powerful, Brittelle's art rock hanidly outperforms the real thing." - Relix Magazine
"William Brittelle's Television Landscape album could be said to draw on as many music channels as a satellite-radio subscription offers. And he seems to integrate them all into one seamless, artfully constructed epic.” - The New Jersey Star Ledger (feature interview)
"(Four star review) The cohesive 50-minute album plays like a glorious reclamation of lush sounds that crusty critics have vilified for years…Like the finest AM gold, Television Landscape soothes even as it dazzles.” - Time Out NY
"…larger than life and spectacular in scope. A synthesis of modern classical invention and avant-garde experimentation, Television Landscape taps Zappa, mid-period King Crimson and composer Gustav Holst as obvious influences. Despite its complexity, it also boasts moments of subtle intimacy…" - M Music & Musicians Magazine
“Sheena Easton holds an anthematic vibe throughout the whole song complete with strings, full chorus backing, and a raging guitar solo.” - Filter Magazine
"The star of the show was Amid the Minotaurs by William Brittelle, the most daring and also cohesive piece of the evening, showing the singers to be extraordinarily skilled with huge ranges and sweet, clear voices, the climax coming with contralto Virginia Warnken suddenly became a pop diva soprano, pinning the audience to their amazed seats.” - The Times Union"Brittelle's crafty, catchy music taps ino the best of what Frank Zappa's oeuvre has to offer, while his surrealist lyrics suggest a copy of Roget's Thesarus, the complete Allen Ginsberg, and a Taco Bell menu fed into Cuisinart. Factor in Brittelle's charisma, and the results are completely electrifying.” -Time Out New York
Featured article, Classical & Opera, Time Out NY: "Read My Lips"
All Things Considered feature interview: "A New Label for Music's New Blood"
"…this song cycle is unhinged from genre, from conventional narrative, and even from conventional singing… The music doesn't just combine elements of rock and classical — it flits from one to the other with often neck-snapping speed." — WNYC's Soundcheck CD pick of the week
"…the orchestra seemed to hit its stride with Bill Brittelle's Obituary Birthday: A Requiem for Kurt Cobain. Kurt was only really a ghost in that song, but I eventually forgot I was listening for Nirvana because the music was so damn beautiful.” - Seattle Met
"William Brittelle's "Obituary Birthday: A Requiem for Kurt Cobain" was a kaleidoscopic drama of protean themes, some epic, some small, floating or urgent. Fragmented melodies and a restless brilliance captured something of Cobain's artistry and, perhaps, Brittelle's take on the man himself." - The Seattle Times