Roger Tréfousse has written a wide variety of music: film scores, operas and musicals, symphonic works, songs and chamber music.
He has composed three operas, The Monkey Opera, premiered at the Brooklyn Academy of Music; Found Objects, commissioned by the Mannes College of Music; and Blue Margaritas, premiered in New York at the Experimental Intermedia Foundation. Départ Malgache, the first section of a new group of short operas with libretto by Kenneth Koch, was featured on WNYC radio.
Two musicals have been produced in New York City, Snobs Cabaret at Encompass Music Theater and Hoosick Falls at The Theater for the New City. Selections from Raft of the Medusa, a work-in-progress, were featured in concert by Downtown Music Productions. He has written incidental music for many plays, among them On the Verge (The Mark Taper Forum), A Husband’s Notes About Her (The Actors Studio) and 1000 Avant Garde Plays (The Robert Wilson Center).
Film scores include the HBO thriller Ladykiller; the PBS documentary Jackson Pollock:Portrait and V.A. Rowlands’s award-winnng short films, Ascending Double Helix (score commissioned for Access Contemporary Music’s 2019 Music and Film Festival in Chicago ) and Entre Les Images. Television credits include music for The Guiding Light and As the World Turns. His music will be featured in Sandra Prechtel’s upcoming film Liebe Angst.
Two new works will be premiered on the Berlin Philharmonic Chamber Music Series at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin on May 10, 2022. Upcoming performances include a quintet commissioned by Composers Concordance in New York City; the premiere of the revised version of Vilanelle for soprano, baritone, guitar, saxophone and piano in Beacon, NY; Going West for English horn and bass clarinet, commissioned by William Wielgus for a recording and performance at American University in Washington, DC; and three songs for soprano and piano on a concert of the SMX ensemble in Berlin. Future plans include a violin and piano recital in Berlin with violinist Sophia Baltatzi; a solo piano recital in honor of Grete Sultan at the Jewish Museum in Berlin and a recording of a little-known song cycle by Weimar-era composer Max Kowalski with soprano Alma Sadé of the Komische Oper. He is preparing a program of improvisations with legendary jazz trombonist, Dick Griffin.
Recent performances include the European premiere by pianist Jan Gerdes of Music for Grete; Graceful Exits for solo oboe, commissioned and recorded by William Wielgus of the National Symphony and Deconstruction for guitar and contrabass. Tréfousse was music director and featured pianist on a program commemorating the Jüdische Kulturbund.at the Jewish Museum in Berlin. He performed Tui St George Tucker’s Second Piano Sonata in a nationally broadcast concert from Lincoln Center and was guest artist on the International Summer Organ Series at St Michel Kirche in Berlin, performing his own music and works by his teachers, John Cage and Ben Weber; he will repeat the program in Hamburg and Braunschweig. Selections from his opera Found Objects were showcased at the National Opera Association conference in Atlanta.
Tréfousse divides his time between Berlin and New York, currently living in Berlin, where he is at work on Berlin/Return, a large-scale vocal and orchestral project inspired by his own sense of return home to Germany–the country where his father’s family and his most influential teachers had lived for generations until forced to flee during the Nazi times. He has received a grant for this project from Kulturprojekte Berlin.
From age twelve, he was fortunate to spend summers at Catawba, poet and classicist Vera Lachmann’s legendary arts camp, an offshoot of Black Mountain College in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. There he met composer Tui St George Tucker, became her accompanist for the music program and later directed the music program during Catawba’s final years. At Catawba, and later in New York through Tui and Vera, he came to know many members of he New York School of composers and artists, including Jackson MacLow, Spencer Holst, Grete Sultan, Merce Cunningham, John Cage, Lou Harrison and Ben Weber, an extraordinary group whose input, ideas and influence had a major effect on his development as an artist. His first pieces were settings of Sappho poems in the original Greek, written after studying Greek lyric poetry with Lachmann at Brooklyn College, and John Cage was the first to offer him a professional critique of his composition efforts when those songs were performed in concert at the Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall in 1978.
Tréfousse received a B.A.magna cum laude with honors in ancient Greek from Brooklyn College. He studied composition as a private student of John Cage and Ben Weber, piano with Grete Sultan and music theory with Siegmund Levarie. He holds an M.A. in Music Composition from Columbia University, where he studied electronic music with Vladimir Ussachevsky and opera with Jack Beeson. He has taught in the Metropolitan Opera Educational Program in New York and in London at Covent Garden. He accompanies singers and instrumentalists on piano, organ and harpsichord and teaches piano, vocal coaching and opera stagecraft in New York and Berlin, and internationally via Skype.
Publications include Listening to Pollock, an essay about composing the music for Jackson Pollock: Portrait, included in Such Desperate Joy (Thunders Mouth Press, 2001; edited by Helen Harrison, with an introduction by Ed Harris) and The Strange Life of Ben Weber, commissioned by the American Composers Alliance Magazine. My Search for Ben Weber was recently published in NewMusicBox. He is currently at work on a biography on Ben Weber.