Ryan Suleiman was born to Lebanese and Mid-Western parents in
California. His music engages with dreaming, the natural world,
and the understated beauty of everyday life. His one-act chamber
opera, Moon, Bride, Dogs, was described by the San
Francisco Chronicle as “a gem” with “an aesthetic that is at once
so strange and so accessible.” While his artistic interests vary,
he seeks ways of conveying the simultaneity of beauty and dread
that characterizes our times. This is the subject of his Piano
Concerto (2020) and an interview series called “Reflections on
Music and Nature,” available on YouTube.
Suleiman is a three-time Finalist of the ASCAP Young Composer
Awards and two-time winner of the FeNAM Student Composers
Competition. His music has been performed at several festivals,
including SICPP (Boston), June in Buffalo (NY), and the NANOworks
Opera Workshop (Atlanta) among others. In addition, he has worked
on commissions and collaborations on chamber, symphonic, and
operatic works with numerous groups, including West Edge Opera,
Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, Daedalus Quartet, Ensemble Dal
Niente, Symphony d’Oro, Citywater, and Rogue Music Project. His
piano cycle, Under Moonlight, was recorded by Jai
Jeffryes in his solo album, Amethyst, distributed by
Naxos.
Ryan enjoys collaborating with both musicians and artists in
other fields. Past projects include concert-length pieces such as
Heartstrings, a work for piano quartet and
dancers (choreographer Jacob Gutiérrez-Montoya), and The
Red Velvet Violin, a multimedia work for narrator, puppets,
and orchestra (director Angelo Moreno at Davis High School).
His two sister operas, Moon, Bride, Dogs and
Bones of Girls (story/libretto by Cristina Fríes), have
received several performances in Northern California and in
Georgia. Additional projects include an orchestral contemplation
of fires in his native California called Burning, the
Piano Concerto, and a new work for socially distanced soprano and
chamber ensemble that explores collective feelings of isolation
in the beloved poet Gibran Khalil Gibran’s “The Robin.”
Suleiman received his Ph.D. from University of California, Davis
(Provost Fellowship) where his advisor was Kurt Rohde, and his
B.M. from Sacramento State. He has taught as a lecturer at the
Sacramento State School of Music and was an associate instructor
at UC Davis, in addition to teaching composition and theory as a
private instructor. Ryan resides in Boston with his wife/musical
collaborator, Sakurako Kanemitsu, and several furry animals,
where he teaches composition in-person and via Zoom. He enjoys
long walks, good food, and the films of Hayao Miyazaki. More
information available at www.ryansuleiman.com.
Ph.D. alumnus Ryan Suleiman (‘20), now an assistant professor of
music at Berklee College of Music, Boston, has launched a podcast
series, “Music and Nature,” which is affiliated
with Landscape
Music, a network of musical artists whose “mission is to
deepen public appreciation of the natural world by providing a
platform for contemporary composers and performers whose music
engages with landscape, nature, and place.” Ryan’s own music
compositions explore dreaming, the natural world, and the
understated beauty of everyday life. The podcast builds off a
couple of pilot episodes from 2020 and is available on your
favorite podcast service.
In a continuance of the Bay Area’s West Edge Opera “Aperture”
series, frequent collaborators and UC Davis alums Ryan Suleiman
(Ph.D. music, ‘20) and Cristina Fríes (M.A. creative writing,
‘19) have once again received positive reviews for an excerpt of
their new opera project, The School for Girls Who Lost
Everything in the Fire.
Two UC Davis alumni are among 20 composer-librettist
pairs preparing a new opera for consideration to be
performed at West Edge Opera’s “Aperture” project. “Aperture” is
an online performance space for new opera works,
which launches in November of 2020.
Ryan Suleiman,
composer (PhD, Music, ‘20), and Cristina Fríes,
librettist (M.A., Creative Writing, ‘19), have titled their new
work School for Girls Who Lost Everything in the
Fire. The piece is a social tale about a group of
orphaned girls finding the hope to rebuild their lives in a
Catholic school in the aftermath of destruction amid mysterious
phenomena.
Ryan Suleiman, a
doctoral student in music composition at UC Davis, has long
been concerned with the environment, nature and climate change.
Over the past few years, Suleiman has written works
titled Drought, Skies of
Smoke and Burning. In
the spring he reached out to other musicians to see what they
had to say about music that explores the natural environment,
with an emphasis on climate change, for a series of YouTube
interviews.
West Edge Opera’s “Snapshot”
Festival program was comprised of four short operas,
including UC Davis Graduate student Ryan
Suleiman’s Moon, Bride, Dogs, which was set to
a libretto by UC Davis graduate student in creative writing
Cristina Fríes. Michael Zwiebach of the San Francisco
Classical Voice reviewed the performance and said of it—
The very title of “Moon, Bride, Dogs,” an eerily beautiful new
chamber opera by composer Ryan Suleiman and librettist Cristina
Fríes, serves as both the cast of characters and a hint at the
piece’s terse M.O. There’s nothing in this 20-minute opus that
doesn’t need to be there, but it covers plenty of ground in
just a few deft strokes.
West Edge Opera’s “Snapshot”
Festival program was comprised of four short operas,
including UC Davis Graduate student Ryan
Suleiman’s Moon, Bride, Dogs, which was set to
a libretto by UC Davis graduate student in creative writing
Cristina Fríes. The work was originally premiered at UC
Davis in May 2018 by the Brooklyn Art Song Society along with
five other pieces for voice and piano in collaboration with
the Program in Creative Writing.
A collaboration between writer Cristina Fríes—alumna of UC
Davis’s Creative Writing program—and current doctoral candidate
in UC Davis’s music composition program will premiere Bones
of Girls in Sacramento January 24–25.
Two versions of a miniature opera by Ryan Suleiman, a doctoral
student in music composition and theory, and Cristina Fríes, who
earned an M.A. in creative writing from the English department,
will have performances in Sacramento, Berkeley and San Francisco
this month.
Graduate student Ryan
Suleiman’s short opera Moon, Bride,
Dogs will be performed twice in a partnership with Bay
Area new music ensembles EARplay and West Edge Opera called
“Snapshot.” His opera is written to a libretto by UC Davis
graduate student in creative writing Cristina Fríes and was
premiered at UC Davis in May 2018 by the Brooklyn Art Song
Society along with five other pieces for voice and piano in
collaboration with the Program in
Creative Writing.
