Frank J. Oteri

Frank J. Oteri (born May 12, 1964) is a composer based in New York City. Oteri is also a music journalist, lecturer, and new music advocate.

Oteri's musical works have been performed in venues from Carnegie's Weill Recital Hall to the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. He was initially interested in composing for musical theatre, and an original musical of his was staged for a week at New York's Carter Hotel Theater in 1980 while he was still a student at The High School of Music & Art, which later merged with the High School of Performing Arts as the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts. He also had a brief appearance in the Alan Parker directed motion picture Fame and scored two children's operas for the Metropolitan Opera Guild's In School project. As an undergrad at Columbia University (1981–1985), he grew more interested in minimalism, microtonality, and non-western music, and he completed a master's degree in Ethnomusicology at Columbia in 1990.

In the 1990s, he returned to writing extensively for the voice, setting poems by E. E. Cummings, Margaret Atwood, William Butler Yeats, and Kenneth Patchen. In 1998 he began working with Italian painter and performance artist Lucio Pozzi on MACHUNAS, an evening-length performance oratorio based on the life of Fluxus-founder George Maciunas which they completed in 2002. In 2005, MACHUNAS was staged at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Vilnius, Lithuania, and was subsequently screened in New York City and San Francisco. In February 2008, Oteri was composer-in-residence at the Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle, Washington, where three of his compositions were performed: The Other Side of the Window (1995), a cycle of seven Margaret Atwood poems scored for female voice, two flutes, guitar, cello, and toy piano; is 7 (2003) for solo harpsichord, performed by Trudy Chan; and Imagined Overtures (2005) for rock band in 36-tone equal temperament.

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