David Clay Mettens
David “Clay” Mettens (b.1990) is a composer of acoustic and electroacoustic concert music. His recent work seeks to distill the strange and sublime from the familiar. He explores moments of elemental beauty and wonder in music marked by detailed engagement with instrumental color, from rich and sonorous to bright and crystalline. He seeks expressive immediacy in lucid forms and dramatic shapes.
His work has been recognized with a 2016 ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Award, the 2015 SCI/ASCAP graduate student commission, and a commission from the American Opera Initiative, premiered in December 2015 by the Washington National Opera at the Kennedy Center. His orchestra piece “Sleeping I am carried…” was selected for the 24th Annual Underwood New Music Readings with the American Composers Orchestra and the 2015 [‘tactus] Young Composers Forum with the Brussels Philharmonic. At the conclusion of the [‘tactus] program, the jury selected his piece to be performed by the Brussels Philharmonic during their 2016-2017 season. The piece was also the winner of Eastman’s 2014 Wayne Brewster Barlow Composition Prize, and received a premiere with the Eastman School Symphony Orchestra in October 2014.
Additionally, his works have been performed by OSSIA on the Cornell Contemporary Chamber Players series and on the Café MoMus new music series at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music. At Eastman, his works were featured on OSSIA, Composers’ Forum, Graduate Composers’ Sinfonietta, and Computer Music Center concerts. His compositions for large ensemble have been performed or read by the University of Florida Symphony Orchestra, the Marshall University Wind Symphony, the Eastman Philharmonia Chamber Orchestra and Wind Orchestra, the Elon University Wind Ensemble, the Brevard Sinfonia, and the University of South Carolina Symphonic Winds.
He is currently a student in the PhD composition program at the University of Chicago, studying with Augusta Read Thomas. He earned his masters degree at the Eastman School of Music, where he studied composition with David Liptak, Robert Morris, Carlos Sanchez-Gutierrez, and Ricardo Zohn-Muldoon, and computer music with Allan Schindler. A native of Covington, KY, he completed his undergraduate studies at the University of South Carolina with a degree in music composition and a clarinet performance certificate. He was a recipient of the McNair Scholarship, the top award USC gives to out-of-state students, and the 2013 Arthur M. Fraser Award from the School of Music. There, his composition teachers were John Fitz Rogers and Fang Man. In the summer of 2013, he studied composition at the Brevard Music Center with Robert Aldridge and David Dzubay, and attended the 2014 New Music on the Point Chamber Music Festival.
He has presented his research on the music of Thomas Adès at the Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition 30th Anniversary Conference hosted by the University of Louisville and the first annual THEMUS graduate-student music theory and musicology conference at Temple University. In 2012, he was awarded a USC Magellan Scholar Grant for a research project involving pipe organs, spectral music, and computer music under the guidance of faculty mentor Reginald Bain.
Photo credit: Hanna Hurwitz