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 

As a founder and artistic director of the Antigone Music Collective, Liam regularly curates and performs contemporary 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.” The AMC performs at their own concert series stateside and regularly at summer festivals abroad. Of their recurring performances at Við Djúpið (Isafjorður), Forbes noted that their performance held the audience “enraptured in a deep meditation from start to finish.”

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, Mark Andre, Chaya Czernowin, and Juri Seo. 

As a soloist, classical concertizing has brought Liam in front of orchestras performing the concerti of Qigang Chen and Iannis Xenakis. Recently he appeared as a soloist at the Vid Djúpið music festival performing Kaija Saariaho’s Sept Papillons and at the Damstädter Fierenkurse performing Marc Andre’s E as part of a new installation work commissioned by the institute. Liam holds a BM from the University of Cincinnati and an MM from the Cleveland Institute of Music. He is currently pursuing a DMA at Bowling Green State University.