Nicholas Ciraldo
Assistant Professor of Guitar
Undergraduate Advisor
D.M.A., The University of Texas
M.M., New England Conservatory of Music
B.M., Indiana University
E-mail: Nicholas.Ciraldo@usm.edu
Phone: 601.266.5401
Guitar Studio
Nicholas Ciraldo joined the faculty at The University of Southern Mississippi in the fall 2005. He has won awards at the Tredrez-Locquemau International Guitar Competition (France), the MTNA Guitar Competition (United States), the Gaetano Zinetti International Chamber Music Competition (Italy), the GFA Solo Guitar Competition (United States), and the Portland International Guitar Competition (United States). He has enjoyed numerous solo performances throughout the United States and Europe, from Boston's Jordan Hall to Berlin's Berliner Dom.
His chamber music collaborators include harpist Franziska Huhn, flutist Thomas Robertello, and guitarist Eliot Fisk. He is also co-founder of the Quadrivium Guitar Quartet and performs regularly with his wife, flutist Rachel Taratoot Ciraldo, in the Ciraldo Duo. His recent chamber performances venues include the Hampden-Sydney Music Festival, the Simsbury Chamber Music Festival, and the National Flute Association.
Dr. Ciraldo has performed as an artist-in-residence with the Quadrivium Guitar Quartet throughout rural Kentucky for New Performing Arts, with the Ciraldo Duo for the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra, and for the Austin Classical Guitar Society. He is also founder of the Hammer/Nail Project, a program that links student composers and guitarists and shows how to write for the guitar in the most idiomatic way possible.
He holds a bachelor of music from Indiana University, where he studied with Ernesto Bitetti and Luis Zea. He also holds a masters of music from the New England Conservatory of Music, where he studied with David Leisner and Eliot Fisk. He holds a doctor of musical arts from the University of Texas at Austin, where he studied with Adam Holzman and received the Freeman Fellowship.