Liam Battle is a cellist in search of spirituality and liberation through performance and ritual. The music he specializes in concerns a wide range of American and Western styles from the mid-century Avant-Garde to new experimental music and free improvisation. He regularly performs in settings that straddle the improvisation, classical, and experimental worlds and he hopes to blur the lines that create such distinctions.

The common thread in all of Liam’s work is a commitment to newness. As a founder of the Antigone Music Collective, he regularly curates and performs contemporary classical music. The ensemble was noted for “Their technical mastery, rich tone, and fluid character…” by Cleveland Classical. Always on the cutting edge of performance and technology, they have also been hailed for their unique integration of mixed media into performance: “the pedal stomping to turn digital pages was distracting.”

Bringing new works into the world is a major part of the work Liam does with the AMC and outside of it. Liam has been the commissioner or dedicatee of dozens of works by composers including Brian Raphael Nabors, Gregory Rowland Evans, Kevin Kay, and Emma Tucker. He has also collaborated with a wide variety of today’s leading classical composers including Joan Tower, Marilyn Shrude, Carlos Sanchez-Gutierrez, and Juri Seo. Classical concertizing has brought Liam in front of orchestras performing the concerti of Qigang Chen and Iannis Xenakis. Liam holds a BM from the University of Cincinnati and is pursuing an MM at the Cleveland Institute of Music.