BIOGRAPHY
Francis Kayali was born in Poitiers, France in 1979. A triple citizen (American, French, and Turkish), he grew up in the French village of La Maucarrière.
In the Fall of 1997, he moved to the US and enrolled at Bowdoin College, where he studied composition with Elliott Schwartz and Robert Greenlee. After graduating with a major in music in 2001, he went on to study composition at SUNY Stony Brook under Perry Goldstein and Peter Winkler. He received an MA in composition in May of 2003.
In 2009, Francis Kayali earned the Doctor of Musical Arts degree in composition from the University of Southern California's Thornton School of Music, where he studied with Frank Ticheli, Tamar Diesendruck, and Donald Crockett.
Kayali has received commissions from the Chamber Opera of USC and Bowdoin College. His Trio for Clarinet, Violin and Piano was performed at the 2008 ACA Festival of American Music at Symphony Space in New York City. His music has been performed by the North/South Consonance Chamber Orchestra, the Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP), the What's Next? Ensemble, the USC Thornton Symphony, the Chamber Opera of USC, the Bowdoin Concert Band, and the Bowdoin Chamber Choir. Kayali was a regional winner in the 2009 SCI/ASCAP Student Composition Competition and second place winner in the ClefWorks 2011 Composition Competition.