Composer Sameer Ramchandran writes music inspired by color and the natural world. Collaborators include the Palisades Virtuosi, percussionist Cameron Leach, HUB New Music, the Wilmington Symphony Orchestra, the Albany Symphony, the Denison Symphony Orchestra, Slee Sinfonietta, Helix! New Music Ensemble, and Encompass New Opera Theatre, among others. His work has been performed at New York City venues such as (le) poisson rouge, the Abrons Art Center, the Frederick Loewe Theatre and the National Opera Center, as well as Houston’s MATCH theater and New Brunswick’s Richard H. Shindell Choral Hall. Ramchandran’s music has been heard at music festivals including the American Music Festival, June in Buffalo, the Space City Music Festival, the TUTTI Festival, the SPLICE Institute, the Cortona Sessions for New Music, the New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival (NYCEMF) and Santa Barbara’s Primavera Festival. Other notable performances of his electroacoustic works include New York University’s Interactive Arts Performance Series, the New Jersey Digital Audio Concert (NJDAC) and NC State’s Arts NOW series. He is a two-time, consecutive winner of the Sherryll C. Corwin Metropolitan Theatres Awards in music composition.


As an audio/visual artist, Ramchandran has provided music for on-line video branding content for companies like Proofpoint and Communities in Schools. He has also provided musical scores for various independent and short films, some of which he has produced himself.  Films that he has scored have been featured at numerous film festivals, including the New Filmmakers at Anthology Film Archives (NY), Domani Vision Film Society Visionfest (NY), Boulder Asian Film Festival (CO) and the San Diego Asian Film Festival (CA).
 An accomplished jazz pianist, he released the album Roundabout with his jazz piano trio to critical acclaim. Jim Santella of Jazz Improv magazine proclaimed it a “stellar session” and that Ramchandran “delivers the music effortlessly.” Jerry D’Souza of All About Jazz wrote that “there are a lot of good things going on here” and that it was “time to sit up and take notice of this trio.” Jason Bivins of Cadence magazine described Ramchandran as “a young player bubbling with energy, whose largely lyrical ideas seem perfectly suited to his colleagues’ freedoms.”


 Current research interests include partimento and schema, jazz and popular music, human/computer interaction, music and narrative, film music and interactive video, the music of Olivier Messiaen and Schenkerian analysis. He has taught music at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, the University of California at Santa Barbara and Rutgers University, where he received his Ph.D.

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