Christian Newman

Christian M. Newman is a composer, multi-instrumentalist, visual artist, author, and music educator based in Albuquerque, New Mexico. His compositions for piano, instrumental ensembles, and electronic fixed media emphasize an intensive level of complexity, expressive timbres, and organic quality of gesture. Similarly, his artworks and graphic scores convey a bewildering array of spatial dimensions, striking use of color, and intricate surface details. Some noted performances of his pieces, including numerous commissioned works, have been given by The Low Frequency Trio (Mexico), Emanuelle Arciuli (Italy), New Music New Mexico (US), Fernando Cardoso (Brazil), Anna Mall (US), Sean Kennedy (US), The Alma Chamber Ensemble (Brazil), and Jonathan Warburton (UK). Many of these performances have been given at festivals and concert series like the John Donald Robb Composer Symposium (Albuquerque, NM), Wolf Tones Electronic Music Festival (Abq, NM), Titwrench Stockholm (Stockholm, Sweden), Klavierfestival Lindlar (Köln, Germany), Sommerkonzerte, St. Marien Kürten (Kürten, Germany), and UNM Faculty Spotlight Series (Abq, NM).

During a long and varied collegiate career, he developed performance skills as a composer, concert pianist, and extreme drummer, participating in numerous international master courses, including the “Musik Aktiv”, “Lebendige Musikerziehung”, and “Fit for Music” courses, and Internationales Klavierfestival Lindlar, in the northern regions of Germany. There he earned certificates in piano performance, physiology of music performance, and advanced piano technique and pedagogy based on works by Peter Feuchtwanger, Franz Liszt, Johannes Brahms, and Falko Steinbach, while also studying European post-war social and musical history.

Since 2011, Newman has taught courses, seminars, and workshops in music theory, music history, music for dancers, composition, and piano performance from elementary to the college level at institutions like the Albuquerque Institute of Music’s Trinity College Theory Program, The University of New Mexico, and Klavierfestival Lindlar, Germany. He has produced multiple complete course manuals, and music theory curriculums, along with music course designs for asynchronous, online learning. His full textbook, Music Essentials from the Western Classical Tradition: Middle Ages to the Present (2024), is available through Cognella Academic Publications in Spring of 2025. Representing a culmination of a decade of intensive writing, this work incorporates multimedia elements, embedded listening, and other digitally enhanced, interactive features to create a contemporary, multimodal path through a vast history of Western Classical Music.

You can stream his music, and learn more about Newman’s work at https://newmanmediagallery.com, and https://christian-m-newman.bandcamp.com. Select works for piano are also available on Tagma Records, Mexico City (Spring 2025).