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Christopher Eastburn is a versatile musician, director, and award-winning composer. Chris’s composing is a synergistic culmination of his work as a producer and choral director, classical composition training, and experience in early music, classical, rock and contemporary ensembles, creating energetic, melodic, emotionally visceral vocal and instrumental music. To commissions and collaborations he brings attention to detail and expert musicianship together with a perspective of emotional depth and understanding and respect for the range of human experience--inspiring contemporary ballet scores to lively and clever theatre music, engaging choral pieces to colorful orchestral arrangements. Recent commissions include Consent to Gravity, a string quartet & vocal quartet score for Newport’s contemporary ballet company Island Moving Co. performed at the Providence Performing Arts Center, the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the RISD museum, Pace-McGill in NYC, MassArt in Boston and by the faculty quartet as part of last summer’s Music at Port Milford chamber music festival in Ontario. He also recently completed a commission for the nationally renowned PALS Children's Chorus celebrating the town of Brookline's 300th Anniversary (libretto from Brookline poet Margo Lockwood) performed at Boston’s Jordan Hall on March 13th, 2006. Other recent commissions include a score for As You Like It for the MIT Shakespeare Ensemble, orchestra arrangements for the von Trapp family’s newest generation of singers, scores for Tufts University faculty choreographer Danny McCusker, and a co-commission with Eliza Moore “Castles in the Air” premiered by PALS at the American Choral Directors Association conference at Harvard’s Sanders Theater. In the Boston area, Chris directs the much heralded Family Folk Chorale. Under his direction the group has grown from 15 to over 50 singers and has had a 40 family waiting list. The chorale has sold out shows at the historic Club Passim, the Regent Theatre, and the Museum of Our National Heritage, done benefit concerts for the U.N. World Food Programme etc. and has performed with Robbie O’Connell (of the Clancy Bros.), Tracy Grammer, Mark Simos and Scott Alarik (folk reviewer for the Boston Globe, Sing Out!, and NPR’s Here and Now Program). Chris also serves on the board of the PALS Children’s Chorus and is editor of the “PALS Presents” choral publishing series. Each summer, he conducts the choir at Music at Port Milford summer music school and festival. He has studied at Connecticut College, Yale University, Aspen & Bowdoin Festivals and Boston University (M.M. ’97) where the faculty elected him to the National Music Honor Society. Ensemble (non-directing) experience has included collaborations with singer-songwriter Eliza Moore and her Celtic-influenced folk band (arranging, guitar, and vocal harmonies), the Boston Secession (tenor), tenor section leader for the adult choir at the Church of the Redeemer in Chestnut Hill and in BU’s Marsh Chapel choir, rock band William Wants a Doll (lead guitar, composer, and vocalist), and the Portland Early Music Consort (lutenist and arranger). Chris enjoys composing for and working with a variety of ensembles and making music with people of all ages and walks of life.
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