David Mecionis

Member since 2015
Executive Director, Artistic Director

DAVID MECIONIS is a self-taught composer, arranger, instrumentalist and music copyist whose work spans a wide range of musical genres. He started out as a rock-adjacent musician (Elliott Sharp, God Is My Co-Pilot, Baby Tooth, Mors Syphilitica and others) but eventually switched gears to composing chamber music. His classical-influenced Grand Saxophone Quartet in E-flat Minor was premiered by the Mana Quartet in 2007. He soon moved from tonality to atonality, always striving to incorporate and reckon with tradition. In 2016 he made the acquaintance of the brilliant Austrian-American composer Raoul Pleskow, who graciously consented to mentor David until the maestro's regrettable passing in May of 2022 at the age of 91.

David's music has been performed and recorded in the U.S., Europe, the U.K., Scandinavia and Russia. His Table Canons for Two Clarinetists were written for Italian clarinetists Guido Arbonelli and Natalia Benedetti, who regularly perform the pieces on tour in and around Italy. In January 2020 they presented the Table Canon Nº1 as part of their clarinet-composition Masterclass at Staatliche Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst in Stuttgart, Germany alongside works by Kagel and Scelsi, and in August 2023 in the Fernando Grillo tribute concert at Chiostro della Pieve di Carpegna, Italy in a program that included works by Stockhausen and Diojenes. David's aforementioned classical-style Grand Saxophone Quartet was recorded and released in 2022 by the Cobalt Quartet. Couple au lit, a far more modernist work, was written for and dedicated to violinist Dan Flanagan, owner of the Jean-Louis Forain painting after which the piece is named. Flanagan toured the piece around the U.S. and Europe last season as part of his solo presentation, The Bow and the Brush, and performed it at Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall. David LaMarche of New York Concert Review writes, "…in Couple au lit, David Mecionis explores the netherworld between waking and sleeping, in a thorny, eerily beautiful and challenging solo.”

David's music is published by American Composers Edition. He currently serves as Executive Director and Artistic Director of the New York Composers Circle, where he enjoys planning and producing an annual series of concerts of new works by a diverse and growing community of member composers.