Claire Chase


Claire Chase is an American flutist, arts entrepreneur, and 2012 MacArthur Fellow based in Brooklyn, New York.

Early life and education

Chase was born in 1978 and grew up in Leucadia, California. She made her solo debut with the San Diego Symphony at age 14 in 1992.
While attending Oberlin College, where she studied with Michel Debost, she received the Theodore Presser Foundation Award in 1999 which she used to commission new compositions for the flute. She received her B.M. from Oberlin in 2001.

Career

After graduating from Oberlin, Chase founded the International Contemporary Ensemble in 2001, and has been its Executive/Artistic Director ever since.
After winning first prize in the Concert Artists Guild competition in 2008, she made her Carnegie Hall debut in 2010 at the Weill Recital Hall.
So far, Chase has premiered over 100 new solo works for the flute, incorporating extended techniques and electro-acoustic elements. Her first solo album, Aliento was released in 2009 and was one of Time Out Chicago's Top 10 Classical Albums of 2009. Chase has performed world-wide as a soloist and chamber musician in diverse venues including Poisson Rouge, Miller Theatre, and Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York City, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington D.C., the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City, and other venues throughout Europe.
She began "Density 2036" in 2014, a 22-year project to commission a significant body of new music for the flute, culminating in the one-hundredth anniversary of Edgard Varèse's "Density 21.5" of 1936. She is also working on Pan, a new 90-minute work for solo flutist, live electronics, and a large ensemble of players from the community in which it is performed.
Beginning in the fall of 2017 Chase has been appointed as Professor of the Practice in the Music Department at Harvard University.

Discography

With John Zorn