Biography
Dennis DeSantis is a composer, sound designer, and percussionist currently based in New York City. He received a Doctor of Musical Arts degree in composition from the Eastman School of Music, and also holds degrees from Yale and Western Michigan University. His principal composition teachers have included Christopher Rouse, Evan Ziporyn, and Martin Bresnick, and he has studied percussion with John Beck and Judy Moonert as well as jazz drumming with Billy Hart.
DeSantis has received numerous awards from ASCAP, including the ASCAP Foundation/Morton Gould Young Composer Award. He has also received two Howard Hanson Prizes and the McCurdy Prize from Eastman, as well as the Rena Greenwald Memorial Prize from Yale, the Theodore Presser Foundation Award, and fellowships from the Aspen, Norfolk, and Bowdoin music festivals.
As a composer of concert music, DeSantis has been commissioned and performed by Alarm Will Sound, eighth blackbird, So Percussion, the Prism Saxophone Quartet, Opus 21, and Relâche, at venues such as Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center, Alice Tully Hall, the Library of Congress, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Recent highlights include a Carnegie Hall commission to arrange the music of Autechre for chamber orchestra.
DeSantis's electronic music has appeared on a variety of labels including Global Underground, Cocoon, and Kanzleramt, and he has performed at clubs and venues throughout North America and Europe, as well as at the SONAR Festival in Tokyo. His original tracks and remixes regularly appear in the playlists of the world's top DJs including such luminaries as Laurent Garnier, Funk D'Void, and Danny Howells (who selected two of his tracks for his "Miami" mix record in 2005.)
DeSantis is also a percussionist and technical director for Alarm Will Sound, with whom he has recorded the music of Steve Reich for the Cantaloupe and Nonesuch labels.
From 2003 to 2005 DeSantis lived in Berlin, where he worked as a sound designer for Native Instruments. He is now in charge of documentation for Ableton.
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