New York City-based musician Brad Balliett is in high demand as a composer and bassoonist.

Principal bassoon of the Princeton Symphony Orchestra, Balliett is a founding member and former artistic director for the chamber music collective Decoda (affiliate ensemble of Carnegie Hall), and performs with the leading new music groups in New York, including Signal, Metropolis Ensemble, and Deviant Septet. As a soloist, Balliett has performed concertos with the Houston Symphony, Metropolis Ensemble, Experiential Orchestra, and the Johannesburg and KZN Philharmonic Orchestras (South Africa). He has commissioned over a dozen works from America’s leading young composers.

Balliett has performed with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, Houston Symphony, Metropolitan Opera Musicians, New York City Ballet, International Contemporary Ensemble, and Hartford Symphony Orchestra and has also enjoyed summers at music festivals including Marlboro, Tanglewood, June in Buffalo, Newport Jazz Festival, Festspiele Mecklenburg-Vorpommen, Stellenbosch International Chamber Music Festival, and the Lucerne Festival.

As a composer, Balliett has witnessed and participated in premieres of his orchestral, chamber, choral, opera, and incidental music. Recent commissions have come from Carnegie Hall, Cecelia Chorus, Metropolis Ensemble, Notre Dame University, Sign & Sing, Experiential Orchestra, Cantori New York, and the Boston Youth Symphony Orchestra Wind Ensemble.

As a member of the band Oracle Hysterical (“music that is unstuck in time” – Wall Street Journal) Balliett has co-composed a number of operatic works and song cycles, including a spoken-word opera premiered at the Lucerne Festival as a Spotlight Artist in composition and an evening-length song cycle commissioned by the Grammy-nominated string orchestra A Far Cry.

With his twin brother, Doug, Balliett teaches at The Juilliard School (Evening Division) and has presented lectures for Carnegie Hall and the New York Performing Arts Library.

As a teaching artist, Balliett regularly leads composition and song-writing workshops in prisons, schools, hospitals, and homeless shelters, both for Carnegie Hall and their affiliate ensemble Decoda. He is a faculty member for Musicambia at Sing Sing Correctional Facility.

Balliett graduated summa cum laude from Harvard University in 2005 and holds an MM from Rice University. His hobbies include writing sonnets, running, and reading Shakespeare and Nabokov.