Biography
London and New York-based composer Noam Faingold started playing punk and metal guitar at 12, eventually broadening his interests to classical and jazz. He combines these musical idioms with music heard growing up as an Israeli born to Argentinean and Brazilian parents. Current projects include a violin and piano sonata, a concerto for virtuoso double bassist Kurt Muroki (Chamber Music at Lincoln Center) and writing and performing with his rock orchestra The Noam Faingold Orchestra. The NFO has recently had the honors of opening the Lower East Side Festival and placing in the top 20 (out of 2,000 entries from 88 countries) in the BBC’s “Next Big Thing 2007” competition. Noam is a member of the NYC-based Circles and Lines and Detour composer collectives and is the composer-in-residence at the Midtown School for the Performing Arts in Tulsa, OK.
Noam also works as a performer and conductor, most recently conducting the premieres of new works by composers at the Bowdoin International Music Festival, and an arrangement of Webern’s notoriously challenging “Five Pieces for String Quartet” for his rock orchestra. As a double bassist he has played with New York’s One World Symphony, Manhattan Camerata, Bowdoin Festival Orchestra and the Boston-based new music ensemble Juventas. He is currently in his first year as a PhD student in music composition at King’s College London on a Jack Kent Cooke Graduate Fellowship, with a teaching assistantship in music analysis.
His music was recently selected for performance at the Aspen Music Festival, the OK Mozart festival, the Bowdoin Festival’s Gamper Festival of Contemporary Music, and has also been performed at venues like the Akademie der Künste in Berlin, Tulsa International Mayfest and prestigious New York City venues like Le Poisson Rouge, Roulette Gallery and Liederkranz concert hall, among others. Past commissions have come from the Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey, NYC’s Transit new music ensemble, violinist Dennis Kim (previous principal violin, Seoul Philharmonic and Hong Kong Philharmonic), Jeff Cowen (principal viola, Tulsa Symphony Orchestra), Joe Bongiorno (double bass, New York City Opera, Mostly Mozart, American Composer’s Orchestra) and others. Awards and grants include a Jack Kent Cooke Fellowship, a Bronfman Center artist’s fellowship, German American Society of Tulsa grant, 1st prize at the University of Tulsa’s Bela Rosza composition competition and 2nd place in arts criticism in music from the Oklahoma Society of Professional Journalists, among others.
Noam holds an MA in music composition from New York University and a BM from the University of Tulsa with a minor in Philosophy and a TURC research fellowship in music. Additional studies include various summers at the Bowdoin International Music Festival, Freie Universität Berlin, and the NYU/ASCAP Film Scoring Workshop. His principal mentors have been Samuel Adler, Ezequiel Viñao, Justin Dello Joio, Claude Baker, Don Freund, Roger Price and Joseph Rivers.
