Carson Kievman

Carson Kievman (December 27, 1949 – October 12, 2021) was an American neo-classical composer. His multi-disciplinary work blended music with the theatrical, visual and literary arts to fully develop a form where the making of music was often theater. 
==Early life and education==
Kievman was born in North Hollywood, California, to artistic parents. His mother was a jazz singer and his father was an actor for Columbia Studios. He studied music composition and interdisciplinary studies at California Institute of the Arts receiving a BFA and MFA ('77). Kievman was mentored by experimental avant-garde composers Earle Brown, James Tenney, and Morton Subotnik. He studied with Harold Budd, Stephan Lucky Mosko, and Leonard Stein. As a student, he was invited to the Darmstadt music festival and became a Leonard Bernstein fellow at Tanglewood. He had two residencies in Paris with French composer Olivier Messiaen (Paris Conservatoire) and worked with and was influenced by such visionaries as Karlheinz Stockhausen, Luigi Nono, Iannis Xenakis, and Luciano Berio. Later in his career, Kievman studied at Princeton University completing a PhD ('03) in music composition and theory. 
==Professional career==
Over the course of his career, Kievman worked as a composer, librettist, stage director, artistic director, lecturer and professor. In 1977, Kievman moved to Greenwich Village and became part of the downtown avant-garde art scene working with visual artists, choreographers, writers and performers. From 1978 until 1980, he was composer and director in residence at the New York Public Theater under the visionary producer Joseph Papp who produced several of Kievman’s music theater works. Papp commissioned Kievman in 1985 to create a full-length opera of Shakespeare’s Hamlet which had a closed reading just before Papp’s death and was premiered in 2012.
Kievman moved to South Florida where he became the composer in residence at the Florida Philharmonic and was commissioned to write Symphony 2(42) which was recorded by the Polish Radio National Symphony Orchestra-Katowice, and the Polish Radio Choir of Krakow, Delta David Gier, conductor, and released on New Albion Records in 1996. He established SoBe Institute for the Arts on South Beach to promote excellence, creativity, and accessibility of the arts through the creation of performance events in music, opera/music-theater and related artistic disciplines. He restored the historic Miami Beach Little Stage Theater as a black box theater where he produced annual concerts and theatrical events and developed a music school for local children and professionals alike alongside the thriving New World Symphony Orchestra that Michael Tilson Thomas established. Kievman was SOBE Arts’ Creative Artistic Director and President until he retired in 2019. 
Throughout his life his works explored wide ranging political, environmental, scientific, and social topics. Kievman created 23 multimedia opera and music-theater works a total of seven full-length stage works including Hamlet, Tesla about his struggle for free energy and Intelligent Systems an epic story about evolution of humanity and the universe, and seven symphonies and various other chamber and solo pieces recorded by pianist David Arden and performed internationally.
Category:1949 births
Category:People from North Hollywood, California
Category:American people
Category:Princeton University alumni
Category:Neoclassical composers