Luke Poeppel

Co-Director of Recruitment

Luke Poeppel is a master’s student at the Eastman School of Music, studying conducting in the studio of Brad Lubman. He is the assistant of the Musica Nova Ensemble, having conducted works by Knussen, Abrahamsen, Davies, Webern, and more. In the coming year, Poeppel will be one of two conductors participating in Ensemble Modern’s ICCS young_professionals program, culminating in a performance at the cresc… festival in Frankfurt (sponsored by Ensemble Modern and the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra). At Eastman, he also serves as an assistant conductor of the Eastman Opera Theater. In the 2022-2023 season, he assisted Timothy Long for the production of Anthony Davis’ Lear on the 2nd Floor and Wilson Southerland for Daniel Catán’s Florencia en el Amazonas. In the Fall of 2023, he will be the assistant conductor for Eastman Opera Theater’s productions of To Hell and Back (Heggie), We’ve Got Our Eye on You (Okoye), Dido (Purcell/Britten), Ariadne auf Naxos Prologue (Strauss), and Dialogue of the Carmelites (Poulenc).

In the Summer of 2023, Poeppel was the conducting fellow of both the soundSCAPE festival (at the Hindemith Center in Blonay Switzerland) and the Mostly Modern Festival, as well as the music director of Rochester Summer Opera. At Mostly Modern, he served as cover conductor for William Langley on Robert Paterson’s In Real Life I/II & Extraordinary. Poeppel also made his cover debut (for Louis Karchin) with the Orchestra of the League of Composers (final season concert); he will return again to the OLC in the Summer of 2024.

He graduated with departmental honors (for his song-cycle, 3 Songs for Molly) from New York University in 2022. Luke was the winner of the 2021 Gustave Ries Memorial Prize in Music from NYU, the Seth Kimmelman award from New England Conservatory, the senior winner of Massachusetts in the 2018 Music Teachers National Association Competition, and the Category-A winner of the Composer’s Concordance 2019 competition. He has collaborated with the JACK Quartet, the Kronos Quartet, Contemporaneous, the Bergamot Quartet, and Yarn Wire. Outside of performance, Poeppel has worked as a research assistant for Dr. Nori Jacoby at the Frankfurt-based Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics between 2020 and 2022 in the Computational Auditory Perception group. During this time, he completed a study on computational techniques for rhythmic search and annotation in the context of Olivier Messiaen’s transcriptions of birdsong. This research was presented at the 2021 Society for Music Theory Conference.