Constantin Basica

Constantin Basica is a Romanian composer living in the San Francisco Bay Area, whose current work focuses on symbiotic interrelations between music, video, and performers. His pieces have been performed in Europe, North America, and Asia by artists such as Séverine Ballon, Tony Arnold, Karen Bentley Pollick, Olga Berar, Ensemble Dal Niente, Ensemble Liminar, ELISION Ensemble, Distractfold Ensemble, Mocrep, JACK Quartet, Spektral Quartet, kallisti, RAGE Thormbones, line upon line, Retro Disco, and Fresh Squeezed Opera. Constantin’s compositions have been featured, among others, at MATA Festival (New York, NY), the International Festival for Video art and Visual Music (Mexico City, MX), Currents New Media Festival (Santa Fe, NM), the International Week for New Music and the InnerSound International Festival for New Arts (Bucharest, RO), and Aveiro_Síntese International Festival of Electroacoustic Music (Aveiro, PT). He received the ICMA Award for Best Submission from Europe at the 2017 ICMC (Shanghai, CN).

Constantin earned a DMA in Composition at Stanford University under the guidance of Jaroslaw Kapuscinski, Brian Ferneyhough, Mark Applebaum, and Erik Ulman. His previous mentors were Georg Hajdu, Manfred Stahnke, Fredrik Schwenk, and Peter Michael Hamel during his MA and Erasmus Scholarship at the Hamburg University of Music and Theatre (DE), as well as Dan Dediu, Nicolae Coman, Doina Rotaru, Bogdan Voda, and Cristian Brancusi during his BA studies in Composition and Conducting at the National University of Music Bucharest (RO).

As an educator, Constantin has taught and conducted workshops at Stanford University, Escuela Superior de Música in Mexico City, the International Centre for Research and Education in Innovative Creative Technologies, the 2016 Sound and Music Computing Summer School in Hamburg, and the George Enescu National College of Music in Bucharest. He is the recipient of the 2018 Carolyn Applebaum Memorial Prize and the 2015 Chair’s Award for Excellence in Teaching in the Department of Music at Stanford University.