About

Los Angeles-based composer and saxophonist Corey Dundee composes music he describes as “rhythmic ridiculousness written in a quasi-atonal yet esoterically functional harmonic language.” Critics have essentially said as much in far less flowery English, characterizing his sonic aesthetic as “trippy dream music” (casual university acquaintance) and “falling down a black rabbit hole” (six-year-old concert-goer in Norfolk, CT). Recently awarded a fellowship to attend the Susan and Ford Schumann Center for Composition Studies at the 2022 Aspen Music Festival, Corey is also a recipient of Chamber Music America's coveted Classical Commissioning Grant, and he was named Honorable Mention for MTNA’s Distinguished Composer of the Year award in 2018. He has undertaken an Artist Residency at the Kimmel Harding Center for the Arts in Nebraska City, and his music has been commissioned by performers and ensembles including saxophonist Timothy McAllister, the Michigan Music Teachers Association, the Norfolk Contemporary Ensemble, and the Taos Chamber Music Group.

As a performer, Corey is the tenor saxophonist of Kenari Quartet, a First-Place Laureate Ensemble of the inaugural M-Prize Chamber Arts competition and recipient of the Fischoff National Chamber Music Association’s 2023 Ann Divine Educator Award. Independently, Corey has appeared as featured soloist with the Cincinnati Pops Orchestra, the North Carolina Symphony, the Hilton Head Symphony Orchestra, the Interlochen Philharmonic, and the UNC School of the Arts Symphony Orchestra. In April of 2012, he performed on stage with singer-songwriter Ben Folds at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC for Arts Advocacy Day 2012. Corey can be heard on NPR’s Telarc-label CD titled “From the Top at the Pops,” performing the third movement of Russell Peck’s The Upward Stream tenor saxophone concerto with the Cincinnati Pops Orchestra.

Corey recently earned a Doctor of Musical Arts in Composition from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he also served as a Graduate Student Instructor for courses in Music Theory, Aural Skills, and Composition. He previously earned an MM Composition degree from the University of Southern California Thornton School of Music, in addition to BM degrees in Composition and Saxophone Performance from the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music. Corey has studied composition with Chris Theofanidis, Evan Chambers, Kristin Kuster, Bright Sheng, Donald Crockett, Ted Hearne, Samuel Adler, Don Freund, and Claude Baker, and his primary saxophone instructors have included Otis Murphy, Taimur Sullivan, and Timothy McAllister. Outside of composing and performing, Corey’s interests include photography, snowboarding, and hip-hop dance.