Daniel A. Weitz (b. 2002) is a New York City-based musician — composer, performer, improviser — of contemplative, theatrical, and narrative-driven music. Throughout his works can be found a particular interest in the relationship between chaos and order, how one contorts and folds into the other, as well as the reproduction of everyday sounds to articulate imagined worlds of destruction, collapse, and rebirth.

Daniel’s work has been performed by acclaimed ensembles such as The Rhythm Method, the Brazilian National Symphony (Orquestra Sinfônica do Teatro Nacional Cláudio Santoro), PinkNOISE, PHACE, TAK ensemble, W4RP, DECODA, and the New York Youth Symphony Jazz Ensemble. This summer, his music will be featured in the 2025 Inštitut .abeceda Contemporary Music Festival in Bled, Slovenia, and has been previously featured in festivals such as the Brasilia Orchestral Summit and Lake George Music Festival， New Music On the Point, Vienna Contemporary Composers Festival.

In addition to being a recipient of Columbia University’s Charles S. Miller Award in music composition and the Richard & Brooke Kamin Rapaport Music Fellowship, Daniel has graduated cum Laude from Columbia College with a Bachelor of Arts in Music and Physics, where he has had the immense privilege to study under Zosha Di Castri, Marcos Balter, Finola Merivale and William Dougherty.

His work You May You May You… explores the intimate relationships that we have with our instruments, or with the tools that we use — how, as these relationships develop throughout our lives as artists, our instruments/tools become entangled with our memory, identity, and being, becoming sanctuaries in which we confer with ourselves. They are reflections of how we use them, of how we are. This piece of music and theater imagines a bizarre manifestation of this relationship wherein the instrument itself has agency to respond. His quintet infants of further life  is a sonic contemplation of the relationship that each of us has with our own childhood, with our own vulnerable, naked, uncertain, yet beautiful beginning; it captures the moments during which our suffering confronts us and forces us back into an original state.

When he is not writing or performing, Daniel spends his time working with children as well as people across various spectrums of physical and intellectual disability. From his work in music composition, he hopes to use his connections to bring the joys of live music to children and to those typically alienated from it. Currently, he works as a Teaching Artist for the Harmony Program, teaching violin, cello, and general music classes.

as of November 2024