ABOUT Levy Lorenzo Contemporary Percussionist

Levy Lorenzo plays electronics and percussion

Born in Bucharest, Filipino-American Levy Marcel Ingles Lorenzo, Jr. is an electronics engineer and percussionist living in New York.

Specializing in microcontroller and Arduino-based systems, he performs and composes live-electronic music using new, custom electronic musical instruments that he designs. His electronics work has been featured at STEIM's 2011 Patterns and Pleasure Festival in Amsterdam, the Guthman Musical Instrument Design Competition, the International Computer Music Conference, the International Society for Improvised Music, the G4TV network, Pitchfork.com, Slashdot.org, the 2007 Geneva Auto Show, and BBC Ecuador. An advocate for interdisciplinary arts, he has collaborated with dancers, video artists, installation artists, mathematicians, sculptors, engineers and dramaturgs.

As an active performer of modern classical music for percussion, he has performed at the Darmstadt International Summer Course for New Music (DE), the International Ensemble Moderne Academy (AT) and gave the US Premiere of Martin Matalon's TRAME VIII Marimba Concerto. Outside of the western classical tradition, his musical background includes free improvisation, Afro-carribean drumming, and drumset for rock and jazz ensembles. Levy is particularly interested in performing pieces that use both percussion and electronic elements.

Levy further combines electronics and music by approaching Live Sound Engineering as a performance role. He specializes in engineering complete concerts of electro-acoustic music with experimental and non-traditional configurations. He was a lead engineer for ICMC 2010, and is currently the Live Sound Engineer for the International Contemporary Ensemble.

Levy was an embedded systems engineer for Bose. He holds Bachelor of Science (B.S.) and Master of Engineering (M.Eng.) degrees in Electrical & Computer Engineering from Cornell University where he was awarded the Ellen Gussman Adelson Prize for music in both 2002 and 2003. He also earned a Master of Music (M.M.) degree from Stony Brook University in Percussion Performance, where he is completing a Doctor of Musical Arts (D.M.A.) degree. Currently, Levy is active as a freelance electronics engineer, as well as a calculus and physics tutor.