BIO
BIOGRAPHY
Hailed as a “first rate, versatile musician” by The New Yorker, guitarist and composer Kyle Sanna is on the move: performing traditional Irish music as well as jazz and improvised music, composing for ensembles, and producing recordings for other artists.
He has collaborated with and performed alongside modern virtuosos like Yo-Yo Ma, Edgar Meyer, and Chris Thile, and with some of the greatest living interpreters of the Irish tradition including Martin Hayes and Seamus Egan.
Sanna’s music has been described as “unconventionally beautiful” by WNYC’s New Sounds and Sound Check host John Schaefer and has been performed at venues across the globe: at the Bach House in Eisenach, Germany, Oman’s Royal Opera House, Sydney’s ABC studios, Taipei’s National Recital Hall, Carnegie Hall, and many points between.
His “ruminative and shape-shifting” (San Francisco Chronicle) work for string quartet, ‘Sequence for Minor White’, won First Prize in the 2018 Charlotte New Music Festival Composition Competition. Kyle Sanna was a Finalist in the 2019 and 2020 Kaleidoscope Chamber Orchestra Call for Scores and in Texas A&M University’s Fresh Minds Festival. He has received commissions from Brooklyn Rider, the Knights, Palaver Strings, Beta Collide, and flutist Alex Sopp.
Kyle Sanna has arranged music for Béla Fleck, Jan Vogler, Anne-Sofie Von Otter, Martin Hayes, and for Yo-Yo Ma on two Grammy Award-winning albums: 2010’s “Songs of Joy and Peace” and 2016’s “Sing Me Home” with Silkroad. His arrangements have appeared on The Colbert Report, NPR’s Performance Today, and on the Sony Classical, Sony Masterworks, and Naïve labels.
Kyle Sanna studied music at the University of Oregon and the Université Lumière Lyon II in France. He is a member of Kinan Azmeh’s CityBand, The Seamus Egan Project, Martin Hayes and the Common Ground Ensemble, Peter Apfelbaum’s Sparkler, Ground Patrol, We the Gleaners, and a duo with violinist Dana Lyn. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.
