Kyle Sanna

Hailed by The New Yorker as a “first-rate, versatile musician”, guitarist Kyle Sanna’s musical practice includes composition, improvisation, the recording studio, coding, and the traditional music of Ireland.

His compositions have been performed at Hamburg’s Elbphilharmonie, the Royal Opera House in Oman, Sydney’s ABC studios, the National Recital Hall in Taipei, New York’s Carnegie Hall, and many points between. WNYC’s New Sounds and Soundcheck host John Schaefer called his music “unconventionally beautiful.”

Kyle Sanna has received commissions from Brooklyn Rider, The Knights, Palaver Strings, Beta Collide, soprano Danielle Birrittella, and flutist Alex Sopp. Festival acceptances include the International Symposium on Electronic Art, The Oregon Bach Festival, and Art Basel Miami Beach. His “ruminative and shape-shifting” (San Francisco Chronicle) work for string quartet, Sequence for Minor White, won First Prize in the 2018 Charlotte New Music Festival Composition Competition. His music appeared on the 2022 PBS documentary “The U.S. and the Holocaust” by Ken Burns, Lynn Novick, and Sarah Botstein.

Kyle Sanna has arranged music for Béla Fleck, Jan Vogler, Anne-Sofie Von Otter, Martin Hayes, and for Yo-Yo Ma on two Grammy Award-winning albums: 2010’s “Songs of Joy and Peace” and 2016’s “Sing Me Home” with Silkroad. His arrangements have appeared on The Colbert Report, NPR’s Performance Today, and on the Sony Classical, Sony Masterworks, In a Circle, and Naïve labels.

In addition to his composing and arranging, Sanna performs regularly as an improvising guitarist with Kinan Azmeh’s CityBand and Ground Patrol, and performs music based in the Irish tradition with the Seamus Egan Project, Martin Hayes and the Common Ground Ensemble, and a duo with violinist Dana Lyn. He is equally at home in the recording studio as on the stage, and has produced nine full-length albums by various artists.

Kyle Sanna studied jazz at the University of Oregon and composition at the Université Lumière Lyon II in France. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.