Kareem Roustom is an Emmy-nominated composer who has written music for film, television, the concert hall and album projects. Steeped in the musical traditions of the Near East and trained in Western concert music and Jazz, Syrian-born Kareem Roustom is a musically bilingual composer who is active on the world stage. Roustom’s music has been performed world-wide at prestigious venues such as the BBC Proms, the Lucerne Festival, the Salzburg Festival, the Elbphilharmonie (Hamburg), the Pierre Boulez Saal (Berlin), Duke’s Hall at the Royal Academy of Music (London), the Verbier Festival (Switzerland), Disney Hall, the Kennedy Center and others.
Roustom’s music has been performed by orchestras such as the Pittsburgh Symphony, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Philharmonia Orchestra (London), the Deutsches Symphony Orchestra (Berlin), the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, the National Orchestra of Belgium, the Grand Teton Music Festival Orchestra under Donald Runnicles, the Grant Park Festival Orchestra (Chicago) Malmo Opera Orchestra (Sweden), the Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra (Bratislava), the Boston Landmarks Orchestra, the Michigan Philharmonic, the Toledo Symphony Orchestra, Staats Theatre Kassel Orchestra (Germany), and others. Roustom’s chamber music has been performed in the USA, Europe, the Near East, China, and Indonesia. Roustom has received two commissions for renowned conductor Daniel Baremboim, a commission for the Kronos Quartet, the Philadelphia Orchestra’s Educational Department, Boston based choir Coro Allegro and others.
Of Roustom’s orchestral Ramal, the New York Times described it as “propulsive, colorful and [an] immediately appealing creation.” Stephen Pritchard in The Guardian wrote that it was an “arrestingly quirky and postmodern…music with lots of personality.” In a review of Roustom’s oratorio “The Son of Man” The Boston Globe wrote “The music… is pitched toward the impassioned, adapting Arabic-derived scales into a rich, heavily perfumed chromaticism, affording both eerie atmosphere and high-impact drama. Moment to moment, [Roustom’s] invention is prolific.”
Roustom’s Emmy-nominated work in film includes a number of award-winning narrative and documentary scores presented at festivals including Sundance, Cannes, Tribeca, and others. He received BMI’s Pete Carpenter Fellowship and a Sundance Film Composers Lab Fellowship.
Roustom has also written arrangements for artists such as Shakira, Beyonce, Wyclef Jean and Tina Turner. Read more at www.kr-music.com.
