Christian Frederickson

Technical Instructor in Theater Arts

Email: cef045@mit.edu
Office: W97-259
Phone: (617) 253-2877

Christian Frederickson is a violist, composer, and sound designer who specializes in live music performance for theater and dance.

Frederickson was a founding member and one of the principal songwriters of Rachel’s, a Louisville KY-based band, who released 6 albums on Quarterstick Records between 1995 and 2003.

The 2016 re-issue of systems/layers, the final Rachel’s album, garnered a “Best New Reissue” on Pitchfork and was called “a truly synthesized mesh of chamber music and electronics that sounded like little else…a godfather record to the nascent (post-classical) genre…”

In their studio albums, a core ensemble of viola, cello, piano, guitar/bass, drums, and percussion was surrounded by other orchestral instruments, tape manipulation, cinematic sound design, found sounds, and electronic elements. Rachel’s toured widely in North America and Europe, and played a concert performance of their album Music For Egon Schiele in Seoul, South Korea. Music by Rachel’s has been used in countless films, theater, and dance performances, the most well-known of which include the 2014 Oscar-winning foreign film The Great Beauty, Hancock directed by Peter Berg, Any Given Sunday directed by Oliver Stone, and both of the Gasland films directed by Josh Fox. Rachel’s also performed on the BBC, NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday, WNYC’s New Sounds (including a special live performance at Merkin Hall in New York in 2005), as well as the national radio networks in Belgium, Italy, and South Korea.

As a solo artist, Frederickson has released seven albums since 2011: The Painted Bird | Bastard, The Painted Bird | Amidst, and Custodians of Beauty are scores for contemporary dance; Death Metal Angola was written for a documentary film by Jeremy Xido about the rock music scene and the aftermath of decades of war in Angola; Teratogeny, The Starving Season, and Islands of Light are collections of music from various film, dance, and theater projects. In 2010 he formed a group called The Young Scamels with Jason Noble and Greg King of Rachel’s. Their album Tempest was the score for a production of the Shakespeare play at Actors Theatre of Louisville. He has recently played concerts of his own music in Boston, New York City, Seattle, Louisville, Nashville, and Zilina, Slovakia. As a guest artist he has recorded viola with Rodan, Shipping News, Seluah, Rachel Grimes, Occurrence, Greg King, Rivulets, Mission of Burma, The For Carnation, Per Mission, Samara Lubelski, and Shannon Wright. His 2022 performance installation The Hammer and the Feather, a collaboration with Greg King, was selected for inclusion in the United States pavilion at the 2023 Prague Quadrennial.

Since 2004 Frederickson has worked primarily in theater and dance, continuing collaborations with Anne Bogart’s SITI Co. which began with the Rachel’s/SITI theater collaboration systems/layers and continued as he wrote and performed music for Antigone, Trojan Women, and Hanjo and designed sound for Steel Hammer, a production featuring the Bang on a Can All-Stars performing the music of Julia Wolfe. He was a perennial guest artist at the SITI Company’s annual training intensive at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, NY.

Frederickson has also had a longstanding collaboration with the choreographer and director Pavel Zuštiak and his Palissimo Company, creating and performing music for six evening-length pieces between 2010 and 2023. Palissimo toured widely in the United States and Europe, with highlights of presenting the entire Painted Bird Trilogy at the Wexner Center and La MaMa ETC, and performing The Painted Bird | Bastard at the State Theater in Bratislava, Slovakia.

Frederickson has received commissions for new music from Yin Mei Dance Company, the Nantucket Atheneum Dance Festival, and Of Moving Colors dance company with the Baton Rouge Symphony Orchestra which resulted in a full-length adaptation of The Tempest. He has worked at a long list of theaters notably the Brooklyn Academy of Music, La MaMa ETC, Classic Stage Company, The Public Theater, Playwright’s Horizons, Cherry Lane, Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, Atlantic Stage 2, The Old Globe (San Diego), Woolly Mammoth, Hartford Stage, On The Boards, Geva Theater, the Tanglewood Music Festival, and Actors Theatre of Louisville where he worked on over 20 productions and was a regular designer at the Humana Festival of New American Plays.

Frederickson was trained as a classical musician and holds a bachelor’s degree in performance from The Peabody Conservatory of Johns Hopkins University and a Master’s degree from The Juilliard School. His principal viola teachers were Paul Coletti and Eugene Becker. From 2000 to 2004 he was the viola instructor at the University of Louisville, also teaching chamber music and orchestral playing. He performed four seasons as a member of the Louisville String Quartet, as well as with the Kentucky Center Chamber Players, the Louisville Bach Society, and other chamber music ensembles.