Bio
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Corey Dargel (b. 1977) is a Texas-born, Brooklyn-based composer and singer-songwriter whose gentle assault on pop and classical idioms creates a tension that pervades his music. Deadpan and detached vocals reveal heartbreaking intimacies, awkward and obtrusive drum patterns struggle against fragile harmonies, vocals and music uneasily opposing each other as songs stumble to their ends.
According to the New York Times, “Mr. Dargel [is] one of the more original and consistently provocative artists pushing at the margins of modern classical music and adventurous pop.” The New Yorker magazine calls him “a baroquely unclassifiable” composer of “ingenious nouveau art songs.” Salon praises his songs’ “rococo ingenuity” and “sustained bursts of lyrical brilliance,” and according to Gramophone magazine, he has “a compositional sense guaranteed to keep close listeners on their toes. Words and music are truly equal partners.”
Dargel’s most recent commercial album, Someone Will Take Care of Me (2010, New Amsterdam Records), is a double-CD set of song cycles adapted from his critically acclaimed music-theater pieces Removable Parts (with pianist Kathleen Supové) and Thirteen Near-Death Experiences (with the International Contemporary Ensemble and drummer David T. Little). WNYC’s New Sounds deems the album “a brilliant collection,” and in New Music Box, Frank J. Oteri writes, “Dargel is doing much more than writing extremely well-crafted songs. He is creating larger arcs of meaning, both musically and lyrically.” The New York Times called Removable Parts, a piece about voluntary amputation, “almost perversely pleasurable… with an intelligent grace that is as moving as it is impressive.” Thirteen Near-Death Experiences, a song cycle about hypochondria, was commissioned by the International Contemporary Ensemble and hailed by Time Out New York as “quite possibly a life-changing event.” The Chicago Classical Review called the piece “wryly witty and often hilarious, crafted with a charming, angular lyricism, the deft lyrics recalling the best work of Warren Zevon and Randy Newman.” Both Removable Parts and Thirteen Near-Death Experiences feature stage direction by Emma Griffin and dances by Yvan Greenberg, two of Dargel’s regular artistic collaborators.
Dargel studied composition at Oberlin Conservatory with John Luther Adams, Pauline Oliveros, Brenda Hutchinson, and Lewis Neilson. He has been the subject of in-studio interviews broadcast on PRI’s Studio 360, NPR’s Weekend Edition, KALW San Francisco’s Then and Now, WFMT Chicago’s Critical Thinking with Andrew Patner, and WNYC’s Spinning On Air. He even earned a tweet from MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow for his art-song settings of the remarks of Condoleezza Rice. He has received awards and residencies from the Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestra, MAP Fund, Meet The Composer’s Commissioning Music/USA program, the American Composers Forum, the Jerome Foundation, the Aaron Copland Fund for Music, the MacDowell Colony, New Dramatists, and the Atlantic Center for the Arts.
Although he is best known as a composer and singer, Dargel also performs as an actor/dancer and founding member of the Brooklyn-based experimental theater company, Laboratory Theater. Laboratory Theater’s work has been described as “ironic, weird, experimental, anti-dramatic, and compelling” (Village Voice) and “[i]nane, insane, mundane… esthetic purity under the guise of the absurd” (New York Press).
photo by Luke Batten and Jonathan Sadler of New Catalogue.
