Nathaniel Stookey

[5][6] In 2006, the San Francisco Symphony commissioned, premiered and recorded The Composer is Dead (2006), a guide to the orchestra with text by Lemony Snicket.

In 2010, the NDR Sinfonieorchester and Christoph Eschenbach premiered Stookey's Mahlerwerk (2010) at the final concert of the centennial "Mahler in Hamburg" Festival.

Stookey has a long-standing musical relationship with the San Francisco Symphony and was one of the original curators of SoundBox, for which he created YTTE (2016), his third commissioned work for the orchestra.

Stookey's earliest published composition was a contribution to the Basque-language hymnal, Meza Abestiak,[9] a gift for the Benedictine monastery of Lazkao, where the composer lived and worked in 1990.

[10] In 2008, Manoel Felciano, Eisa Davis, and the Oakland Symphony conducted by Michael Morgan premiered Zipperz (2008) for two pop singers and orchestra, with texts by Dan Harder.

[13] Stookey created the score for John Doyle's 2010 production of Bertolt Brecht's Caucasian Chalk Circle at the American Conservatory Theater (A.C.T.)

[5] Where Every Verse is Filled with Grief (2009) for solo violin, an arrangement of the second movement of Alfred Schnittke's Concerto for Choir, was commissioned by Kunst-Stoff for choreography by Yannis Adoniou.

[24] Stookey has worked often in San Francisco's experimental music scene and his work uses influences outside of classical boundaries.<> Among his early collaborators was the crossover cellist Sam Bass (of the bands Deadweight, Loop!Station and Les Claypool's Fearless Flying Frog Brigade) for whom Stookey wrote both his "opus 1" Sonatina for Sam (1992) and the song Hard Up (2011).

[25][26] Stookey composed and recorded the string introduction to the song Soothsayer (2007) on The Mars Volta's album The Bedlam in Goliath.

In the same year, he created Junkestra (2007) for an orchestra of instruments he built from objects scavenged from the city dump, and has performed on the musical saw in this work.

[29] Nobody Suffers Like We Do (2009), a drinking song inspired by the sounds of a convenience-store cash register, with words by Daniel Handler, was commissioned and recorded by the Harvard Din & Tonics in commemoration of their 30th anniversary season.