Michael Laurello

Michael Laurello is an American composer and pianist. He has written for ensembles and soloists such as Sō Percussion (Brooklyn, NY), Sandbox Percussion (Brooklyn, NY), the Yale Percussion Group, the Yale Philharmonia, Sound Icon (Boston, MA), the 15.19ensemble (Pavia, Italy), NotaRiotous/The Boston Microtonal Society, guitarist Flavio Virzì, soprano Sarah Pelletier, pianist/composer John McDonald, and clarinetist and linguist/music theorist Ray Jackendoff. Upcoming collaborations include an evening-length work for the Triplepoint Trio (New Haven, CT), made possible through an artist residency at the Avaloch Farm Music Institute (Summer 2015).
Laurello is an Artist Diploma candidate in composition at the Yale School of Music, where he received the Jacob Druckman Scholarship and the Rena Greenwald Memorial Scholarship for 2014-15. His primary composition teachers at Yale are David Lang, Martin Bresnick, and Christopher Theofanidis. He holds an M.A. in composition from Tufts University, where he studied under John McDonald, and a B.Mus. in music synthesis (electronic production and design) from the Berklee College of Music. Recent honors include a commission from the American Composers Forum and an Emerging Artist Award from the St. Botolph Club Foundation (Boston, MA). He has attended composition festivals at highSCORE (Pavia, Italy) and Etchings (Auvillar, France).

In addition to his work as a composer and performer, Laurello is a recording engineer and a teaching fellow at Yale.

Big Things – excerpt:

In the Composer’s Own Words:
When I started writing Promises in September of 2014, I imagined the orchestra as an enormous machine relentlessly chugging away to accomplish some sort of task, or moving towards a goal of some kind. But, even as I got a little deeper into composing the piece, I still wasn’t sure what the goal was. Should the music grow bigger? Should it get smaller and smaller? Should it push so hard that it breaks apart? Eventually one of my teachers said to me: “This music seems like it’s promising something. You just have to decide whether or not it’s going to break its promise.” This made me think not only about the concept of a musical promise, but also about some of the promises that I’ve kept and those that I’ve broken in my life. The music started to represent something more personal and profound, and I composed the bulk of the piece with these thoughts in mind. In the end, I don’t know whether the piece keeps its promise, but I like to think it does.