Biography
Eleanor Aversa finds inspiration from the Russian tradition, the study of music cognition, and the relationship of music to language.
Noted for being both lyrical and bold, Eleanor’s music has been honored with the 2010 Northridge Composition Prize (Hero’s Welcome for orchestra), First Prize in the 2009 San Francisco Choral Artists’ New Voices Competition (Eyes Open), and the 2008 Brian M. Israel Prize (Movement for String Quartet), as well as fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her work has been performed in 17 cities in nine states, including venues such as The Boston Conservatory, The Bowdoin International Music Festival, June in Buffalo, Symphony Space, and Tanglewood. Her electroacoustic works have been presented at Ball State University, California State University at Fullerton, The Disjecta Interdisciplinary Arts Center, and the Música Viva Festival of Portugal. She has also completed two electroacoustic commissions for choreographer Danuta Petrow-Sek, the second supported by a grant from The Queens Council on the Arts. These multimedia works explored such themes such as conformity to society vs. fidelity to self and personal vs. public identity.
A longtime Slavophile with a degree in Russian Language and Literature from Princeton, Eleanor lived in the Moscow area from 2002 to 2005, working as an English teacher and translator. She also immersed herself in the local musical life, accompanying harpist Simeon Kulkov at the Tchaikovsky Conservatory and singing in the choir of the Immaculate Conception Cathedral, performing both Latin and Russian Orthodox sacred music. From these involvements, her work absorbed elements of folk melody, quasi-modal harmony, and asymmetrical meter.
After returning to the U.S., Eleanor served on the faculties of Pace University and New York University teaching English as a Second Language. At the same time, she earned a Master’s Degree in Composition from the Aaron Copland School of Music at Queens College CUNY, where she studied with Bruce Saylor and was awarded the Marvin Hamlisch and Herbert Sukoff Memorial Awards in Composition.
Once a Research Fellow in genetics at New York Medical College, Eleanor now conducts music cognition research on responses to contemporary concert music. In 2009 she published a review in Music Theory Online concerning the implications of David Huron’s landmark book Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation on those who write and promote new music.
Eleanor Aversa is currently a Benjamin Franklin Doctoral Fellow in Composition at The University of Pennsylvania, where she studies with James Primosch, Jay Reise, and Anna Weesner and has been awarded the David Halstead Music Prize. Her dissertation, Open Doors, will be recorded by the Curtis Symphony Orchestra on March 15, 2012.