Tom Cipullo

Tom Cipullo (Born November 22, 1956) is an American composer. Known mostly for vocal music, he has also composed orchestral, chamber, and solo instrumental works. His opera, Glory Denied, has been performed to critical acclaim in New York, Washington, and Texas.

Tom Cipullo was born into a musical family on Long Island, New York. His father, a jazz bassist playing under the name Ray Carle, performed throughout the New York area and hosted a successful radio show in the late 1950s and early 1960s, broadcasting with a quartet from the Café Rouge of the Statler Hilton Hotel. Cipullo’s brother, Chris, was a drummer in Los Angeles. Cipullo’s father named him after the bandleader Tommy Dorsey. Dorsey, who appeared frequently at the Café Rouge, died just a few days after Cipullo’s birth.

Cipullo attended Hofstra University, Boston University, and the City University of New York Graduate School. His teachers included David Del Tredici, Elie Siegmeister, Albert Tepper, Thea Musgrave (orchestration), and Graham Forbes, a highly regarded jazz pianist and the accompanist for Frank Sinatra during a period in the 1950s.

Cipullo’s song cycles may be said to have entered the standard repertoire. He has composed over 225 songs, one evening-length chamber opera, six works for voices and chamber ensemble, solo piano pieces, and works for chorus and orchestra. Several of his song cycles are published by Oxford University Press, and others are distributed by Classical Vocal Reprints. His music appears on over a dozen commercially-released compact discs on the Albany, CRI, PGM, MSR Classics, GPR, Centaur, and Capstone labels.

Cipullo is a composer of tonal music, though his use of harmony may occasionally stretch to include bitonality and extremely dissonant passages. His vocal music is lyrical in the extreme, but marked by large leaps, lengthy phrases with surprising breaths, numerous shifts in meter, virtuosic piano accompaniments, and a love of musical allusion. Writing for the New York Times, Allan Kozinn said, “Mr. Cipullo’s vocal writing is fresh and natural, and he amplifies it with thoughtful, sometimes picturesque commentary in the piano line.” Cipullo’s compositions are text-driven, and Fanfare magazine noted that “he excels by pulling off the conjuror’s trick mastered by all the great writers of poem-based song from Schubert forward—the blurring of the demarcation between where the word ends and the music begins.” In presenting him with its ' Arts & Letters Award, the American Academy of Arts & Letters cited Cipullo’s music for its “inexhaustible imagination, wit, expressive range and originality.”

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