Augustus Arnone is an adventurous pianist who has made a home at the edge of transcendental extremes in the modern repertory. His repertoire includes seminal works by John Cage, Iannis Xenakis, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Frederick Rzewski, Elliott Carter, Luigi Nono, Alvin Lucier, Morton Feldman, Donald Martino, and Milton Babbitt. A stalwart champion of the ever controversial Babbitt, Mr. Arnone performed the composer's complete solo piano music over the course of two evenings at Merkin Concert Hall, the recordings of which available as streaming audio here. Mr. Arnone is an ardent advocate of new music and music by emerging composers, and has collaborated with composers Roberto Sierra, David Rakowski, Jason Eckardt, Edmund Campion, Stephen Gorbos, Christopher Bailey, Yotam Haber, and Michael Klingbeil. He is also an enthusiastic improviser and recent concerts have featured solo improvisation using MIDI-enabled acoustic piano as well as digital synthesizers.
Driven to a large extent by immersal in the writings of Marshall McLuhan, Mr. Arnone began the Collide-O-Scope Music series of collaborative concerts in the Spring of 2010 along with composers Stephen Gorbos and Christopher Bailey. The fundamental artistic directive behind these concerts was the simultaneous combination of numerous diverse media forms, both visual and aural, electronic and acoustic. Now approaching it's third seaon, the Collide-O-Scope Music concerts, besides featuring cutting-edge ambitious repertoire, have remained experimental and perceptually challenging, mingling the old with the new, and fixed compositional forms with improvisation and musique concrète. An integral part of the series has been the co-mingling of music and other sonic forms with contemporary visual art, video art, and photography. The series has also led to ensemble partnerships with a number of exciting instrumentalists currently active in the NY area.
Mr. Arnone has performed at venues throughout Manhattan and Brooklyn including Merkin Concert Hall, Roulette Concert Space, the Issue Project Room, and Tenri Cultural Institute, as well as at the Atlas Center for the Performing Arts in Washington DC, the Krannert Center in Urbana,Illinois and a number of universities in the eastern part of the US. Besides performing with Collide-O-Scope Music he has appeared with the Argento Chamber Ensemble and Ensemble X.
Mr. Arnone completed his doctoral studies at Cornell University where he studied historical performance practice with Malcolm Bilson. During that time, he presented recitals using period instruments spanning the entire history of the piano, from eighteenth-century five-octave pianos to mid-nineteenth-century precursors to the modern piano. In addition, he was active as a musicologist, focusing research on the music of Brahms and the performing culture of the mid-to-late-nineteenth century. This led to the publication of two articles as well as lecture-presentations at a number of universities, and, in 2003, at the national meeting of the American Musicological Society. Mr. Arnone holds degrees from the Boston Conservatory, the University of Michigan, and a Doctorate in Musical Arts from Cornell University. Principal teachers include Malcolm Bilson, Marilyn Nonken, Logan Skelton, Jonathan Bass, Penelope Crawford, and William Heiles.