About Tom

Hailed by the American Academy of Art & Letters for music of “inexhaustible imagination, wit, expressive range and originality,” composer Tom Cipullo is the winner of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship (2012) the Arts & Letters Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters (2013), and fellowships from Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Liguria Study Center (Italy). The New York Times has called his music “intriguing and unconventional,” and The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has called him “an expert in writing for the voice.” Cipullo’s music is recorded on the Naxos, Albany, CRI, PGM, MSR, GPR, Centaur, and Capstone labels, and is published by E.C. Schirmer, Oxford University Press, and Classical Vocal Reprints.

Cipullo’s first opera, Glory Denied, is one of the most frequently produced of 21st-century American operas with over 25 productions to date. The Fort Worth Opera recording on Albany Records was cited by Opera News as among the best of 2014. Reviewers have hailed the work as “terrifically powerful… superbly written” (Fanfare), praising its “luminous score (Washington Post),” and noting “the dramatic tension was relentless (Opera News).” Cipullo’s second opera, After Life (libretto by David Mason), has been called “a finely wrought exploration of the role of art in times of grave crisis (Washington Post)” and “unfailingly inventive (Opera News).” Recorded on the Naxos label, After Life is the winner of the 2017 the Domenick Argento Chamber Opera Composition prize from the National Opera Association. Recent projects include the opera Mayo, winner of the 2016 Pellicciotti Opera Composition Prize from the Crane School of Music, and a new chamber opera, The Parting, commissioned by Music of Remembrance and premiered in Seattle in May 2019 (recording forthcoming from Naxos in April 2020).