Bio
Liam Cummins (b. 2004) writes music that pays homage to time-honored traditions while diving into unexplored territory. His music fuses wide-ranging, disparate elements, seeking new windows into age-old traditions.
Liam's music has been recognized widely for its nuanced craft, inventive orchestration and broad emotional range. He is a recipient of a 2024 Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, winner of a 2023 ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Award, winner of a 2022 YoungArts Gold Award in Classical Music and a winner of the 2022 American Prize in composition. His music has been recognized by organizations including Tribeca New Music, Orchestra of St. Luke's, New York Youth Symphony, American Composers Orchestra, National Young Composers Challenge, The Silent Voices Project, Juilliard's AXIOM competition, the New England Philharmonic, Icarus Quartet, and NPR's The American Sound. In 2022, he was the only young composer in the country nominated for consideration as a United States Presidential Scholar in the Arts. This year his music premieres at Alice Tully Hall, The Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Aspen Music Festival, and other venues throughout the United States.
Liam is pursuing a Bachelor of Music degree in composition at The Juilliard School, studying with John Corigliano. He has been awarded fellowships at Aspen Music Festival, National YoungArts Week and the DeGaetano Composition Institute, and has participated in festivals including Curtis Institute of Music’s Young Artist Summer Program, Yellow Barn's Young Artist Program, The Walden School, the Cleveland Institute of Music's Young Composers Program. Through these opportunities he has studied with luminaries including Augusta Read Thomas, Christopher Theofanidis, Nico Muhly, Martin Bresnick, David Ludwig, Pierre Jalbert, Reiko Füting, Melinda Wagner, George Tsontakis, Zhou Long, Ana Sokolovic, Eric Nathan, Pascal Le Boeuf and Chen Yi.
Liam is an avid backpacker and lover of adventure. When not creating or sharing music, you’ll likely find him in the natural world, camera and notebook in hand, seeking adventure at every opportunity. In turn, these experiences deepen and enrich his musical passion.
Liam's music has been recognized widely for its nuanced craft, inventive orchestration and broad emotional range. He is a recipient of a 2024 Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, winner of a 2023 ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Award, winner of a 2022 YoungArts Gold Award in Classical Music and a winner of the 2022 American Prize in composition. His music has been recognized by organizations including Tribeca New Music, Orchestra of St. Luke's, New York Youth Symphony, American Composers Orchestra, National Young Composers Challenge, The Silent Voices Project, Juilliard's AXIOM competition, the New England Philharmonic, Icarus Quartet, and NPR's The American Sound. In 2022, he was the only young composer in the country nominated for consideration as a United States Presidential Scholar in the Arts. This year his music premieres at Alice Tully Hall, The Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Aspen Music Festival, and other venues throughout the United States.
Liam is pursuing a Bachelor of Music degree in composition at The Juilliard School, studying with John Corigliano. He has been awarded fellowships at Aspen Music Festival, National YoungArts Week and the DeGaetano Composition Institute, and has participated in festivals including Curtis Institute of Music’s Young Artist Summer Program, Yellow Barn's Young Artist Program, The Walden School, the Cleveland Institute of Music's Young Composers Program. Through these opportunities he has studied with luminaries including Augusta Read Thomas, Christopher Theofanidis, Nico Muhly, Martin Bresnick, David Ludwig, Pierre Jalbert, Reiko Füting, Melinda Wagner, George Tsontakis, Zhou Long, Ana Sokolovic, Eric Nathan, Pascal Le Boeuf and Chen Yi.
Liam is an avid backpacker and lover of adventure. When not creating or sharing music, you’ll likely find him in the natural world, camera and notebook in hand, seeking adventure at every opportunity. In turn, these experiences deepen and enrich his musical passion.
Artist Statement
"The extremes are easy. Only the middle is a puzzle."
– Louise Gluck
My music lives in the middle. My music lives suspended between different traditions, styles, sound-worlds and communities.
Though I am a musician first and foremost, I am also a lover of photography and creative writing. I'm an avid backpacker, a sailing enthusiast and an amateur astronomer. I am also an admirer of architecture, aviation and infrastructure.
I have similarly eclectic musical interests. I am a classically trained composer, pianist and cellist, but I am also an avid improviser who likes to create fugues on the spot, an impromptu percussionist who co-opts kitchen pots and pans for music-making, a student enthralled by the physics of sound.
Like my own passions and interests, my music embraces the fusion of diverse, sometimes seemingly disparate ideas. I want my art and my artistry to connect contrasts and divides – some sonic, some societal – with clarity and nuance. My job as a composer, then, is to create bridges, spanning unpredictable and inevitable, old and new, in order to engage people from different backgrounds and perspectives. I strive to put my music in that precarious middle ground, pulled taut by extremes on all sides but ultimately anchored in the middle. Only from the foundation of this delicate balance, I have found in my music, are the merits of all extremes within reach.
In the greatest sense, then, I strive to make my music a force for connection and interrelation – a force for melding ideas, for bringing people together.
– Louise Gluck
My music lives in the middle. My music lives suspended between different traditions, styles, sound-worlds and communities.
Though I am a musician first and foremost, I am also a lover of photography and creative writing. I'm an avid backpacker, a sailing enthusiast and an amateur astronomer. I am also an admirer of architecture, aviation and infrastructure.
I have similarly eclectic musical interests. I am a classically trained composer, pianist and cellist, but I am also an avid improviser who likes to create fugues on the spot, an impromptu percussionist who co-opts kitchen pots and pans for music-making, a student enthralled by the physics of sound.
Like my own passions and interests, my music embraces the fusion of diverse, sometimes seemingly disparate ideas. I want my art and my artistry to connect contrasts and divides – some sonic, some societal – with clarity and nuance. My job as a composer, then, is to create bridges, spanning unpredictable and inevitable, old and new, in order to engage people from different backgrounds and perspectives. I strive to put my music in that precarious middle ground, pulled taut by extremes on all sides but ultimately anchored in the middle. Only from the foundation of this delicate balance, I have found in my music, are the merits of all extremes within reach.
In the greatest sense, then, I strive to make my music a force for connection and interrelation – a force for melding ideas, for bringing people together.