Bio

 Composer, pianist, writer, and singer, Nicole DeLaittre was born in Seattle, WA. Nicole didn't hear any pop music until the age of 12. She began composition at the age of 7 with Janice Giteck, spending a lot of time improvising and considering different approaches to music. Her older sister was a concert pianist, and Nicole's early influences were all classical, though her later influences are eclectic and diverse. Those years were overspilling with piano competitions.


At age 9, she won first place for her composition in the Ladies Musical Club Reflection Composition. At age ten, she won first prize for the elementary level Junior Tuesday Musical Club Competition. At age 11, she showcased a recital at Sherman Clay and won first place in the MTA user's association, also performing the Dvorak Sonata Op 100 in G at the Young Artist Chamber Music Concert with violinist Yuri Namkung. She received a certificate of recognition from the Seattle Young Artists Festival, and won second place in the the Simon Fiset piano competition with Aaron Coplands "The Cat and the Mouse." At 13, she received first prize in the Performing Arts Festival of Eastside for playing Saint-Sans second piano concerto. The year later she won second prize in the 1996 Scholar Competition for the Washington's State Music Teacher's Association. Finally, she won second place while playing the Prokofiev Third Concerto in the Seattle Young Artist Festival when she was 14.

Along with continuing to progress in piano and composition, she studied conducting, singing, ensemble playing, and theory at Interlochen Arts Academy, graduating on the honors roll, then attending Lawrence College, finishing her degree at Cornish Arts Academy, where she received a bachelor's degree in composition. At 15, she wrote a piece for choir, mezzo-soprano, string quartet, and oboe that was promptly conducted at Interlochen by band conductor John Ross.

She wrote The Sicillian Interlude for the Seattle Chamber Ensemble, (Paul Taub (flute), Laura DeLuca (clarinet), Mikhail Shmidt (violin) and David Sabee (cello), and Child On Acid for the Saint Hellens String Quartet. She wrote the chamber piece Abstractions for the Degenerate Art Ensemble. She has also collaborated, written, and performed her duo piano piece Vandalizing Flowers with jazz pianist Dawn Clement. She has performed with Paris Hurley, a violinist. Paris played and recorded Like a Zebra Stalking God, Quantum Dilation, and Dead End. All of these pieces were for piano and violin. Violinist Mikhail Shmidt performed the piece Throwing Webs with Nicole DeLaittre on the piano. She wrote Tranquilize Me, a multi-movement piece for flute, piano, and electronics, which flutist Paul Taub and Nicole DeLaittre performed and John Burrow recorded. She wrote the piece Suicidal Elephants on Chandeliers for clarinetist Beth Fleenor. It was recorded by a percussionist, pianist, singer, and clarinetist. Roger Nelson has performed the piano piece Bluffing by Nicole Delaittre, as well as help conduct and perform Sublime Retreat, a piece for singer and ensemble.

Nicole has written for singers a great deal, and her thesis was an opera, Cradling Ashes. The libretto, written by Nicole, is a long surrealistic yet biographical story. The piece was written specifically for the singers Caleb Burhans and Roger Nelson in mind. It is available in the University of Washington library. The idea behind her thesis is based on the idea that music and psychology can function together to explain something that pitch-sets and repetitions in timbre and notes cannot. When she does not write her own lyrics for vocal music, she uses Rimbaud's poetry. So far she has set seven different Rimbaud poems to music. The only other poet she has used is Phillip Levine, with a few small exceptions. (In high school, after reading Ayn Rand, she wrote the piece Ego, using quotations from Rands second book, Anthem, published in 1938. Then, when exploring Allen Ginsberg's poetry she wrote the piece Naked; having read what she could about the Beatniks, it gave her the courage to use her own words as lyrics to a piece. Josephine Hart's book Oblivion compelled her to she use passages from "A Letter to my Dead Child" (p 81) to conceive of and write Angel Child, an emotional piece about losing a child. The piece was musically inspired by Benjamen Britten. ) All three were choral pieces with different accompanying instrumentation written and performed at Interlochen Arts Academy.

Her composing style is tonal, atonal, serial, modal, jazz, minimalistic, experimental. In other words, she has a strong voice and people say they can recognize when a piece is hers, but her musical aesthetic differs fiercely from piece to piece.

She has also written for and performed other such pieces alongside horn player Josiah Boothby, horn player Erin Vork, piano singer, conductor, and professor Roger Nelson, singer and violist Martha Cluver, and violist and composer Nathan Carrick Bell. She has written and performed two pieces with percussionist Bonnie Whiting. She has written for bass player Chuck Deardorf, and either collaborated or written for composer-pianists Haley Kallenberg, Michael Trinastic, Chris Murray, James Welsch, Ava Mendoza, Amy Rubin, David Cutright, and Danny Holt. She's improvised with and written for the composer and multi-instramentalist for Alarm Will Sound, Caleb Burhans.

Toying with more than just non-western rhythmic patterns, atonal intervals, and rock harmonies, she's collaborated alongside painter and assistant producer to Lost, Sonya Masinovsky, united efforts with creative writer David Latere, sung against DJ Brenden Barnett's back-beats, as well as worked with a film-maker that used her piece for a soundtrack. Her junior year at Cornish she arranged a concert with a dancer that cheographed movements to a 45 minute piano piece entitled Bobby Fischer without chess.Right now, she is finishing a piece for two bassoons that will be premiered by Tama Kott and Arnold Irchai in the year 2010.

She has worked with David V. Ingerman, a mathematician from MIT in the hopes of formulating a new method of analyzing and understanding contemporary music.

She has been published in a book of poetry composited by Dennis Tyler. Her writing instructors were poet Dr. Nick Bozanic and Starr Rush, the latter with whom she finished an independent study in creative non-fiction. Her other main interest is chess. She learned chess at age 21, then began teaching at elementary schools and camps for Chess Mates two and a half years later. She's annotating a chess book with grandmaster Ken Thompkins, who is in the midst of publishing his second chess book.

Nicole has studied composition under Janice Giteck on and off for 15 years. Other composition teachers have been Elaine Broad, Phillipe Bodin, Joanne Metcalf, Amy Rubin, George Tsontakis, electronic music expert John Burrow, Joël-François Durand, DXARTS champion Richard Karpen, theorist John Rahn, and composer Juan Pampin. At the University of Washington, she spent a year in the DXARTS program learning to use Supercollider with code languages A++ and Lisp.

Her primary piano teachers have been Michi North, Yoshi Nagai, Peter Mack, and Michael Kim. Both Michi North and Michael Kim attended Julliard.

She is excited about finding a path that fulfills her desire to work in more than one creative medium. She hopes to divide her time between creative writing pursuits, chess, piano performance, electronic music experiments, and freelance composition. She would love to write for film.

Nicole DeLaittre received her Masters at the University of Washington in Music Composition in July, 2009. She loves Seattle.

Being well-versed in theory and music composition she tries to follow the pedagogue of her forefathers while incorporating the individual needs of her students. For younger students she utilizes the Suzuki method with slight adaptations. This method depends a lot on listening. The younger students receive recordings of the repertoire they are learning. For older students, they often need to make their own interpretation of their piece before listening to recordings. Scales and technique are important. So is the appreciation of music. She wants to take her students needs into account.

Nicole teaches private piano lessons on capital hill and performs improvisation in various arenas.