Christopher Rountree

Conductor and composer Christopher Rountree stands at the intersection of classical music, new music, performance art, and pop. He was named music director of Long Beach Opera following his debut with the company in the 2020–21 season conducting Philip Glass’s Les Enfants terribles. He maintains a long-term relationship with Martha Graham Dance Company (MGDC), resurrecting, recording, and performing works by Copland and Kodály as well as Rountree (commissioned by MGDC) and others with his ensemble Wild Up, which he founded in 2010 and serves as artistic director and conductor. In 2019 Rountree began recording a four-volume set of the music of Julius Eastman. In conjunction with this project, he toured the country with Wild Up, culminating in an Eastman portrait at the National Gallery in Washington, DC. He is working on two operas about love and technology with librettists Royce Vavrek and Roxie Perkins. 

Rountree’s inimitable style has led to collaborations with: Björk, John Adams, Yoko Ono, David Lang, Scott Walker, La Monte Young, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Mica Levi, Alison Knowles, Yuval Sharon, Sigourney Weaver, Tyshawn Sorey, Ragnar Kjartansson, Ash Fure, Julia Holter, Claire Chase, Missy Mazzoli, Ryoji Ikeda, Du Yun, Thaddeus Strassberger, Ellen Reid, Ted Hearne, James Darrah, and leading orchestras and ensembles including the San Francisco, Chicago, National, Houston, and Cincinnati symphony orchestras, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, International Contemporary Ensemble, Roomful of Teeth, Opéra national de Paris, and the Los Angeles, Washington National, and Atlanta operas. He has presented compositions and concerts at Los Angeles’s Walt Disney Concert Hall and The Getty, Paris’s Palais Garnier, Denver’s Mile High Stadium and Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, the Coliseum, Washington’s Kennedy Center, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Downtown Los Angeles’s ACE Hotel, Brooklyn’s National Sawdust, The Hammer Museum, a basketball court in Santa Cruz, and at Lincoln Center as part of the NY PHIL BIENNIAL. 

In addition to leading Wild Up, Rountree is artistic director of SILENCE, an interdisciplinary ambient series in an oak grove in Los Angeles. A seventh-generation Californian, he is descended from the first sheriffs of Santa Cruz County, and lives in the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles.