Douglas J. Cuomo – composer

Douglas J. Cuomo began his professional music career at eighteen, touring the country as a jazz guitarist, and started composing professionally five years later after moving to New York City. 

Early compositional works include RADICAL ROOTS: The History of 20th Century Theater, a multimedia piece in which tactile pads for the audience become part of the score in accordance with Italian Futurist musical principles, and a score for PORTRAIT of DORA incorporating a hysterical soprano and solo cello and drawing on music of Freud's Vienna. 

In 1991 he received a Meet-the-Composer grant for his first full-length original work, ATOMIC OPERA, which was performed at the Ohio Theater in New York City. Exploring American attitudes about the atomic bomb in the 1950's and 60's, the opera was described as "elegiac and eerie...[suggesting] the breaking down and reconstitution of matter into something ominous and uncontrollable." (The New York Times). The music for this piece incorporated electronic and taped elements, processed samples of American popular music from the 40's and 50's, and a computer-generated piece for dance accompaniment.

Two years later, he received a Resident Artist Fellow at Mabou Mines. While there, he created LEAD, an electronic piece that set the reading of a short story by writer Matthew Kreitzer. Two other pieces written around this time, SHADOWBOX and NO-HOUSE ASYLUM PROJECT, allowed me further opportunity to explore the blending of music, dance and stage elements into a coherent whole.

In 1994-1995 he received a National Endowment of the Arts grant and a Blue Mountain fellowship to continue work on an opera about race relations in New York City. (Work is still ongoing on this project.) 

Over the last six years, he has also written music for theater, film and television. Among other work, he created a fierce electronic landscape to fit the edgy realities of the Peabody-Award winning television series, HOMICIDE: Life On The Street; an Afro-Cuban and jazz-infused theme and score that captured the energy of the television series SEX AND THE CITY; and an elegiac, folk-influenced score for Bill Moyer's upcoming documentary film HUDSON RIVER. He also has a long-standing relationship with Broadway's Roundabout Theatre and has composed scores for over a dozen productions. 

In addition to ARJUNA’S DILEMMA, he is currently collaborating on a music theater piece with librettist Michael Korie, working on a commission for the cellist Zuill Bailey, and developing an opera based on the outsider artist Henry Darger.