Nathan Lincoln de Cusatis
Nathan Lincoln-DeCusatis 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 with a special emphasis on music evoking natural landscapes and wilderness spaces. His music has been described in Gramophone as “a dazzling, often momentous slice of life…” 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 by The Utah Symphony, The National Orchestral Institute Philharmonic, The Chesapeake Orchestra, Inscape Chamber Orchestra, The Atlantic Reed Consort, Corvus, and by members of the St. Louis, and National Symphony Orchestras. In June, 2021 his violin concerto The Maze was premiered by violinist Madeline Adkins under the baton of Marin Alsop as part of the NOI festival at the Filene Center at Wolftrap, VA and then in January, 2022 under the baton of Theirry Fischer with the Utah Symphony. Since 2015 he has served as composer-in-residence for the Pikes Falls Chamber Music Festival in Vermont, and in 2018 he was the inaugural composer-in-residence for the Jackson Hole Chamber Music Festival in Wyoming. 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 currently serves as Assistant Professor of Music at Fordham University where he teaches classes in music theory, jazz, and music production.