Nathan Currier

Nathan Currier (born 1960, Huntingdon, Pennsylvania) is an American composer.

Coming from a musical family, composer Nathan Kind Currier is son of composer Marilyn Currier (1931) and brother of composer Sebastian Currier (1959).

His principal teachers were David Diamond, Joseph Schwantner, Bernard Rands, Stephen Albert and Frederic Rzewski. He studied at the Juilliard School, where he received the Doctorate in 1989, and also served on their Evening Division faculty over a ten-year period. Starting in 2007 he served for two years as a visiting faculty member at the McIntire Department of Music at the University of Virginia. In 2016 he initiated a concert series called Orchard Circle, with concerts in New York City and Philadelphia.

Nathan Currier's largest work is an oratorio called Gaian Variations. The premiere took place at Avery Fisher Hall, Lincoln Center, on April 21, 2004, but was interrupted mid-concert, shortly after the beginning of the third act. The work is about Gaia, a scientific hypothesis developed by James Lovelock to explain the role of living systems in the regulation of Earth's climate and biogeochemical cycles. The composer described his work as both a description of the theory and a contextualization of it within the history of science, and he spent years writing the large work for chorus, orchestra and soloists. During the premiere the Brooklyn Philharmonic suddenly stopped, claiming that it was headed into overtime, ultimately triggering a lawsuit.

Leading American composer John Corigliano, also a board member of the Brooklyn Philharmonic, called Gaian Variations, “Just beautiful. Very, very skilled work, and very inspired too.” The New York Times, however, published a highly critical review by Allan Kozinn that began by claiming the work's texts (featuring writings by Lovelock himself, describing his Gaia theory) were “mostly pseudoscientific.”

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