Improvising Cellist, Danielle DeGruttola, is an acoustic and electric cellist and composer. Her cello improvisations fuse multiple genres, room acoustics, and electronic sound, creating thoughtful and powerful compositions that interweave elements of contemporary jazz, classical, electronica, folk, blues, rock, and hardcore. Her sublime sound is adventuresome and exploratory yet maintains concrete form. "Her contributions are uniformly excellent." (Exclaim magazine).
Danielle began exploring electronic music and improvisation in 1988 while studying music at Smith College, and concentrating on jazz performance, and electronic music synthesis at Berklee College of Music, and the Center of New Music at Mills College in the 1990s.
She’s created original cello music for the Werner Herzog films: "Grizzly Man", and "Encounters at the End of the World" and appears alongside Herzog in the documentary "In The Edges: The Grizzly Man Sessions". She has co-written multiple pieces with singer-songwriter Richard Thompson for film and the DISCOVERY television series "The Grizzly Man Diaries", and performed with outstanding improvisers including Henry Kaiser, Jim O’Rourke, Buckethead, Bob Bralove, Miya Masaoka, Lukas Ligeti, Michael Manring, Tania Chen, Soo-Yeon Lyuh, and Wu Na.
Her music has been influenced by her love of art throughout her life; her mother was a ceramics artist and painter and her father, an art historian. She has created cello improvisations with multiple artists including a collaboration with abstract expressionist painter Wilfred Croteau “Quartet” (1990), and most recently with artist Claudia Hart including “Inside the Flower Matrix” (2017), “Alice at Christie's Rockefeller Plaza (2019)”, “Alice XR (2019)”, and “Alice XR: A Machine for Thinking (2022)”. Her music is readily available online and she appears on more than 24 CD releases.
Danielle received her MFA in Electronic Music and Recording Media at the Center of Contemporary Music at Mills College, and her BFA in music from Smith College graduating Cum Laude. She has also studied at Berklee College of Music (90-92), the Center of New Music and Audio Technology (CNMAT, 95-96), and the New England Conservatory of Music (NEC, 82-86).
