Claire Chase

Claire Chase is an American flutist who has built a career almost entirely around music written in her own lifetime. She co-founded the International Contemporary Ensemble in 2001 and in 2013 launched Density 2036, a project to commission a new body of solo flute music every year until the centenary of Varese's landmark solo flute piece Density 21.5. In this directory she appears with the Seattle Symphony and with the La Jolla Symphony and Chorus.

Chase treats the flute as a whole family of instruments and a set of noises. Expect her to switch between the standard flute, the deeper alto and bass flutes, and the enormous contrabass flute, and to use breath, whistles, humming into the tube and amplification as musical material rather than effects. Her La Jolla programs center on Kaija Saariaho's Aile du songe, a concerto in which the solo line behaves like a bird, darting, hovering and settling, with the orchestra kept transparent around it. In Seattle she performs Annea Lockwood's Elwha!, written for seven flutes and surround sound, a piece built from the sounds of a river in Washington State that was freed when its dams came down. Both works reward listening for texture and space more than for tunes.

Chase was born in California in 1978. She studied at the Oberlin Conservatory, where she worked with flutist Michael Lynn, and settled in New York, where in 2001 she was among the founders of the International Contemporary Ensemble, serving for years as its artistic director and chief executive. In 2012 she received a MacArthur Fellowship. The following year she began Density 2036, an ongoing commissioning cycle for solo flute that adds a new program of works each year and is planned to run through 2036, the hundredth anniversary of Edgard Varese's Density 21.5. She has taught at Harvard University as a professor of music.