Nathan Lincoln de Cusatis is a jazz and classical composer based in New York City. His music encompasses a wide variety of media and styles including his jazz piano trio MOB RULE, the 10-piece improvising ensemble Micro-Orchestra, and classical pieces for orchestra, sinfonietta and chamber ensembles. His music has been described in the Washington Post as “a kind of kaleidoscope…each moment bringing a shift in the harmonic feel and flow, from jazzy licks to piled-up counterpoint to independent chords.” All About Jazz calls him “a musician that has absorbed the stylistic vocabularies of the greats and distilled them into his own personal approach both muscular and lyrical.”

His music has been performed nationally by such groups as The Chesapeake Orchestra, Inscape Chamber Orchestra, The Atlantic Reed Consort, and The Great Noise Ensemble. Since 2015 he has served as composer-in-residence for the Pikes Falls Chamber Music Festival in Vermont, and in 2018 his music will be part of Composing in the Wilderness in Denali National Park and the Fairbanks Arts Festival, AK. Awards and accolades include an American Music Center CAP award, the Walsum Prize, an Atlantic Center for the Arts residency under composer/musician Henry Threadgill, and the Ithaca College Smadbeck Prize.

His music was released on the Inscape Chamber Orchestra’s Grammy-nominated release Sprung Rhythm on the Sono Luminus label, and his chamber symphony was released on Inscape’s 2014 record American Aggregate. As a jazz pianist he has performed at several venues in New York City including ShapeShifter Lab and Club Bonafide, and he has released two jazz LPs: Micro-Orchestra a chamber jazz collaboration with saxophonist Kurtis Adams, in 2015; and MOB RULE, his piano trio album, in 2018. Nathan holds degrees in composition from Ithaca College (BM) and the University of Maryland (DMA). He currently serves as Assistant Professor of Music at Fordham University where he teaches classes in music theory, jazz, and music production.

2018 Commissioned Work:
Nameless Empire is a piece for string octet and bass/baritone voice that weaves a historical narrative about man’s relationship with wilderness spaces, drawing from Native American creation myths, primary documents and the writings of major 20th century conservationists. Commissioned by the Jackson Hole Chamber Music Festival, this piece takes the natural environment of the festival’s location in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem as a starting point to trace changing human viewpoints on the Rocky Mountains ranging from the sacred (a Shoshone creation story), the human instinct to civilize and conquer (John C. Fremont’s report on the summiting of the Wind River range), and finally leading to the epiphany that humankind itself is part of a larger wilderness community and that our presence there is transient and intrusive (the writings of Aldo Leopold and Edward Abbey).  The singer inhabits each of these writer’s voices in a multi-movement piece that ultimately concludes with the realization that the mountain wilderness is a nameless empire unto itself, more expansive and more timeless that any of man’s own creation.