The Ensemble Sospeso presents the musical imagination of Gheorghe Costinescu in the first of our yearly American Voices series, on Saturday, April 6, 2002, at the Miller Theatre in New York.

The distinctive music of Romanian-American composer Gheorghe Costinescu blends music with theatre and live performance in an unique synthesis of media. He was born in Bucarest in 1934 and has resided in New York since 1969. Active as a composer, conductor, pianist, musicologist, and educator, he received a PhD with distinction from Columbia University, where he studied with Chou Wen-chung. He also did post graduate work at the Juilliard School, where his main teacher was Luciano Berio, and he earned an MA in composition from the Bucharest Conservatory, under Mihail Jora. He also studied with Nadia Boulanger at Fontainbleu and attended the new music courses at Darmstadt and Cologne, where he worked with Stockhausen and Henri Pousseur.

Mr. Costinescu is the recipient of a music award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, as well as two grants, as producer and composer, from the National Endowment for the Arts. He has also received the Gretchaninoff Memorial Prize in composition and the Mancini Fellowship from Juilliard, and in his native country he earned the Enescu Prize from the Romanian Academy. Further honors include fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts; awards include a Fullbright Scholar award and grants from the American Music Center, Meet the Composer, and the Ford Foundation.

Mr. Costinescu's compositions, which span chamber, choral, orchestral, and stage works, have received premieres in New York, Paris, Cologne, Bucharest, and at music festivals at Tanglewood, Shiraz-Persepolis, and Royan.

His work for the stage The Musical Seminar was chosen by the national jury of the League ISCM as an official American submission to the ISCM World Music Days; the German version of the work, Tatort Musik, was produced by the State Opera of Stuttgart in 1989, and the British premiere took place in 1992 at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in Glasgow.

His theoretical writings include essays on comparative aesthetics, studies and articles on contemporary music, and a treatise on musical phonology. He has taught in New York at the Juillard School, Columbia University, Brooklyn College, the New School for Social Research, and since 1980 has been on the faculty of Lehman College of the City University of New York, where he also directs the electronic music program.