Metropolis is a nonprofit producing organization for new music and the artists who make it. Our work is to build the conditions that allow ambitious musical ideas to move from imagination to reality.

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Founded in New York City in 2006 by conductor, producer, and organist Andrew Cyr, Metropolis develops, records, and launches ambitious new music projects in collaboration with composers, performers, and presenters. Known for championing a new generation of composers and performers, the organization’s work spans orchestral premieres, studio recordings, interdisciplinary collaborations, and site-specific events in New York and beyond.

Through its recordings, performances, and collaborations, Metropolis has helped introduce many of today’s most compelling new voices in contemporary music.

Impact at a Glance

GRAMMY®nominated organization: recordings and productions associated with 3 GRAMMY nods including PRODUCER OF THE YEAR.

450+ original commissioned works developed since 2006

3 Best-of-Year citations in 2024–25 alone: New York Times, NPR, Gramophone

JUNO winner: Classical Composition of the Year — Vivian Fung's Violin Concerto, commissioned for violinist Kristin Lee; performed across the US and Canada

30K+ reached via Biophony (our free annual street festival with NYC DOT) and Summer Solstice at Brooklyn Botanic Garden

Women and a young girl performing music outdoors among green trees. One woman is singing into a microphone, another is playing a violin, while the girl operates music equipment.
Street scene in New York City with a live music performance by a small ensemble. Four musicians playing string instruments, with two women and two men, are performing on a cobblestone street. There is a signboard showing 'Biophony' and other public s
Actors in costumes performing in a play, dressed as pirates in a boat set, with expressive faces and period clothing under stage lighting.
Group of five musicians, three women and two men, holding violins and a cello, standing outdoors on a cobblestone street in an urban neighborhood with brick buildings, trees, and people in the background. All are smiling and wearing sunglasses.
Musicians performing on a stage, with a woman singing, a man playing a saxophone, and an orchestra in the background, with a large
A person with curly hair conducting an orchestra, holding a baton, with sheet music and a grand piano in a dimly lit setting.
A stage performance featuring a woman in traditional Asian attire sitting on the floor surrounded by circular objects, with an orchestra of women seated behind her holding string instruments in a dimly lit, modern auditorium.
A group of four musicians playing timpani drums during a concert in a hall with wooden wall panels.

What the Press Says

How We Work

A group of people standing in a room with elegant wallpaper, some holding musical instruments and sheet music, appearing to be at a formal event or concert.

Artist-first commissioning — Multi-year collaborations built around the work — not a fixed ensemble. Each project is developed from the ground up: tailored instrumentation, studio recordings, and full production support that puts our artists on the map.

An audience watching a musical performance on stage with multiple musicians playing instruments, illuminated by purple lighting, with a large screen displaying cityscape imagery in the background.

Immersive stages — From sunrise performances at Brooklyn Botanic Garden, to city plazas via our street festival Biophony, to dome experiences in Los Angeles, we find the stage the work demands and build toward it.

A group of musicians in a recording studio, playing string instruments like violins and cellos. There is a sound engineer or conductor standing at the front, and several microphones hanging overhead. The room has bookshelves filled with books and is equipped for professional audio recording.

Recorded by experts — We record with world-class artists and engineers with major and independent labels (Nonesuch, New Amsterdam, Def Jam, , Western Vinyl, Merge, Naxos). Awards and international press follow the work and accelerate the careers behind it.

Talent Pipeline

We identify and invest in future leaders early — before the field catches up. Alumni have gone on to win national and international prizes and hold concertmaster positions at NY Phil, Minnesota Orchestra, OSM, and Seattle Symphony. ensembles and redefine repertoire. The pipeline is long and the results speak for themselves.

Artist Acclaim

Artists who've worked with Metropolis have gone on to win Pulitzer Prizes (Caroline Shaw), Rome Prizes (Christopher Cerrone, Erin Gee, Paula Matthusen), Grammys (William Brittelle), Guggenheims (Vivian Fung), and major orchestra commissions (Timo Andres, Sarah Kirkland Snider, David Bruce). We don't take credit for their talent — we take pride in recognizing it early.

Selected Productions

A selection of projects spanning recordings, premieres, interdisciplinary collaborations, and civic-scale performances, created in collaboration with composers, performers, filmmakers, and artists across disciplines.

  • Two women are dancing on a stage in a theater, with a woman leading in the foreground and a man behind her, all dressed in vintage-style clothing. The stage has bright lights and a dark background with empty seats visible.

    In a Grove (Prototype)

    New York Times “highlight of the festival... best of 2025, so far."

  • Group of musicians holding cellos in a recording studio or concert hall, some smiling and posing for the photo.

    The Blind Banister (Dolby Atmos)

    Gramophone Editor’s Choice; New York Times/NPR year-end lists.

  • A street corner with five musicians performing outdoors, with the Manhattan Bridge visible in the background. Two female musicians are seated, playing violins and an accordion, while three male musicians are standing playing clarinets and a double bass. There is a promotional sign for an event called 'Biophony' by Metropolis Ensemble nearby.

    Biophony (citywide)

    55 commissions; 650+ musicians; 125+ free shows; 30k+ attendees.

  • An outdoor concert with a seated audience, musicians playing keyboards and drums, stage lights, and a partly cloudy evening sky.

    Summer Solstice (Brooklyn Botanic Garden)

    Sunrise meditations and sunset re-imaginings drawing thousands.

  • A modern building with a curved roof lined with blue neon lights and a large glass front. The building has a sign that says 'cosm'. The scene is sunny with scattered clouds, and there are trees and other buildings around.

    Liquidverse (COSM)

    Immersive full-dome at COSM: Ricardo Romaneiro’s LIQUIDVERSE, Metropolis records World Premiere audio-visual symphony for 87-foot 12K LED cinematic space in Los Angeles and Dallas.

  • A musical performance on stage featuring a singer with a microphone, an orchestra of musicians with instruments, and a backup band with laptops and electronics, under blue and purple stage lighting.

    Caroline Rose (Brooklyn Steel)

    Caroline Rose x Metropolis at Brooklyn Steel: orchestral reimaginings of her acclaimed albums.

  • A stage performance with multiple musicians, singers, and dancers, decorated with large colorful banners and illuminated with stage lighting, set against a backdrop projection of a moonlit sky.

    Bangsokol (BAM)

    A Requiem for Cambodia—Metropolis with Cambodian Living Arts, Him Sophy, and Oscar-nominated Rithy Panh; mourning, testimony, communal healing; projects toured BAM, Boston, Paris, Montreal, Melbourne, Taiwan, Phnom Penh

  • A man with an afro hairstyle playing electronic drums on stage with colorful geometric decorations in the background.

    Electronium: The Future Was Then (BAM)

    Metropolis Ensemble joins Questlove of The Roots at BAM’s Next Wave

  • A boat with a large sail featuring a lion emblem, sailing on a calm river surrounded by trees and buildings in the background.

    Drifting in Daylight (Central Park)

    Metropolis brass aboard Ragnar Kjartansson’s S.S. Hangover circles Harlem Meer, performing Kjartan Sveinsson’s score for Creative Time at Central Park.

How We Work

  • A stage performance with a musical ensemble and a singer, colorful stage lighting, audience seated in front, and a dark backdrop.

    Multi-genre fluency — built for collaboration

    From orchestra to indie, jazz, electronic, and performance art — we work across genres because the work demands it. Questlove & The Roots, Caroline Rose, Emily Wells, Ricardo Romaneiro, Wye Oak, Ragnar Kjartansson, Tan Dun, Roscoe Mitchell, Deerhoof, Immanuel Wilkins, Erik Hall. Releases on Nonesuch, Merge, Naxos, Western Vinyl. Stages from city streets to the Hollywood Bowl, from downtown studios to The Met Museum. The Tonight Show. The work travels.

  • A person playing a grand piano on stage with performers and audience members watching in a modern, geometrically designed concert hall illuminated with blue and red lighting.

    Invited artists — a curated roster

    We identify distinctive voices — from leading conservatories and the wider professional community — and invite them into a real development pathway: workshops, concerts, premieres, residencies, and studio recordings. Every stage is fully resourced so composers and performers can focus entirely on the work. Projects land on global stages. Careers advance.

  • A smiling man in a blue and black shirt stands among large green plants in a greenhouse, holding binoculars and looking at the plants.

    Long-game collaborations — Ricardo Romaneiro

    Nearly 20 years together—from intimate Upper East Side townhouse salons and early labs, through Biophony: SoundGarden at Brooklyn Botanic Garden (all seven conservatories; sensor-driven soundbath with live ensemble)—to large-scale immersion with LIQUIDVERSE at COSM’s 87-foot domes in LA and Dallas. Same composer, growing canvases; our production infrastructure makes the leaps possible. One example among many.

  • A man stands in front of an audience giving a presentation in a gallery or classroom setting. The audience is seated and listening, with some holding papers or notebooks. There is a grand piano on the right side, and stylized black and white artwork on the wall behind them.

    One Rivington — artists lead, we clear the path

    Our Lower East Side studio-lab hosted 100+ shows (2017–2020) and is back this season. We hand the keys to composers and entrepreneurial musicians while covering production, engineering, artist support—so ideas move fast from concept to stage.

    Result: In a Grove was incubated at Rivington before its acclaimed Prototype premiere. Dozens of composer and artist residencies. Pay-what-you-want eliminates economic barriers.

A smiling man in a black polo shirt with a badge, outdoors in a wooded area, with two background musicians playing wind instruments.

Artistic Director — Andrew Cyr

Andrew Cyr is the founder and artistic director of Metropolis, and one of contemporary music's most distinctive creative forces — conductor, organist, and producer.

Over twenty years he has built Metropolis into a full production organization whose artists have gone on to win Pulitzers, Grammys, Rome Prizes, and Guggenheims. A Grammy-nominated conductor, his productions span releases on Nonesuch, Western Vinyl, New Amsterdam, Merge, Def Jam, and Naxos, with collaborators ranging from Roscoe Mitchell to Timo Andres, Erik Hall to Tan Dun, Tyondai Braxton to Vivian Fung, Emily Wells to Questlove.

“Precise, rhythmically incisive and fluid…” — Esa-Pekka Salonen

“A prominent influence…led with tasteful panache.” — The Washington Post

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A live musical performance on stage with a singer in front, surrounded by an orchestra with string and wind instruments, lit with blue and purple stage lighting, and a large audience in the foreground.

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  • Metropolis is a nonprofit producing organization for new music and the artists who make it.

    Our work is to build the conditions that allow ambitious musical ideas to move from imagination to reality.

    Founded in New York City in 2006 by conductor, producer, and organist Andrew Cyr, Metropolis develops, records, and launches ambitious new music projects in collaboration with composers, performers, and presenters. Known for championing a new generation of composers and performers, the organization’s work spans orchestral premieres, studio recordings, interdisciplinary collaborations, and site-specific events in New York and beyond.

    Over the past two decades Metropolis has commissioned, developed, and produced projects that would not otherwise exist: a decade-long opera incubated at our Lower East Side studio before its acclaimed Prototype Festival premiere; Sarah Kirkland Snider’s orchestral album Forward Into Light on Nonesuch; Simeon ten Holt’s Canto Ostinato reimagined for fifty musicians alongside Erik Hall and Sandbox Percussion on Western Vinyl; Roscoe Mitchell’s Metropolis Trilogy, merging baroque, classical, and jazz traditions; the international production of Bangsokol: A Requiem for Cambodia by Him Sophy and filmmaker Rithy Panh, which toured six countries across three continents; and Ricardo Romaneiro’s Liquidverse, staged inside an 87-foot dome at COSM. Metropolis productions have earned three GRAMMY recognitions and appeared on stages ranging from the Hollywood Bowl and Lincoln Center to the Kennedy Center and NBC’s Tonight Show.

    Metropolis does not operate with a fixed instrumentation or a house sound. Each project begins with a simple question: what have you not yet been able to make? From there we assemble the collaborators, resources, and production framework needed to bring that work fully into the world.

    We believe some of the most vital music being created today often emerges outside the traditional institutions built to present it — work whose scale, timelines, and interdisciplinary nature fall outside the structures those institutions were designed to support. Our role is to build the conditions that allow this work to exist: the relationships, the time, the space, and the resources that sustained artistic creation requires.

    Metropolis’s long-term collaboration with pianist and composer Timo Andres — spanning more than two decades and including multiple commissions, two albums on Nonesuch, and a GRAMMY-nominated recording — reflects the kind of sustained artistic partnership at the center of our work.

    Metropolis’s public programs also include large-scale civic and site-specific events. The organization has maintained a five-year collaboration with Brooklyn Botanic Garden, presenting a range of garden-wide projects including the past three editions of Solstice, a pair of sunrise and sunset performances that together form a seasonal musical ritual gathering thousands of listeners each year. Alongside Metropolis’s annual Biophony street festival, these programs bring communities together to experience new music at a civic scale, reaching tens of thousands of New Yorkers.

    Through its recordings, performances, and artistic partnerships, Metropolis has helped introduce many of today’s most compelling voices in contemporary music.

    Based in New York City, Metropolis operates from Rivington on the Lower East Side — a creative laboratory and public-facing venue where artists develop new work and audiences encounter it in its earliest and most adventurous forms. More than one hundred projects have been incubated and presented there in close collaboration with the artists who make them.

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    • Andrew Cyr, Founder/Artistic Director

    • Jenna Mulberry-Eng, Business and Events Manager

    • Katherine Fortunato, Digital Engagement and Production Associate

    • Henry Wang, Artist Support

    • Horacio Fernández, Production Assistant

    • Phong Tran, Production Assistant

    • Armistead Booker, Digital Media and Community Engagement Advisor

  • (last updated November 21, 2025)

    • Eric Brewster (Chair)

    • Jennifer Omabegho (Vice-Chair)

    • Matthew Strassler (Secretary)

    • Paul Kovach (Treasurer)

    • Stephanie Amarnick

    • Andrew Cyr (Founder/Artistic Director)

    • Jeff Guida*

    • Mikhail Iliev

    • Candice Madey*

    • Edward Sien

    • Henry Wang (Artistic Advisor)

    • Susan Weiler 

    • June Wu (Chair Emerita)

    • Edward Jones (President Emeritus)

    *On Leave

    Past Board Members

    • Mali Gaw

    • Eduardo Loja

    • Vladimir Nicenko

    • Arienne Orozco

    • Glenn Schoenfeld

    • Brandon Ziegler

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