Aaron Cassidy’s work as a conductor is stylistically diverse, encompassing both contemporary and historical repertoire across chamber, orchestral, operatic, and choral settings. He has performed in the Großer Saal of the Berlin Philharmonie for Musikfest Berlin, at the Munich Biennale, MaerzMusik at the Festspielhaus Berlin, the Elisabeth Murdoch Hall of the Melbourne Recital Centre, Gare du Nord Basel, Dampfzentrale Bern, the Metropolis New Music Festival (Melbourne), Klangbrücken Festival (Hannover), June in Buffalo, and has recorded at Deutschlandfunk Köln for the Deutscher Musikrat/Podium Gegenwart series and at the WDR Funkhaus for the Musikfabrik im WDR series. He has led many dozens of world premieres, including for example new works from Richard Barrett, Mary Bellamy, Ann Cleare, Nomi Epstein, Turgut Erçetin, Lucia Kilger, Dariya Maminova, Sergej Newski, and Erik Oña, as well as several of his own compositions. 

Cassidy has appeared as a conductor with Ensemble Musikfabrik, ensemble mosaik, ELISION, Schola Heidelberg, Ensemble Proton Bern, International Contemporary Ensemble, Ensemble Interface (for the IEMA Edenkoben International Conducting Mastercourse), the Monochrome Project, the Northwestern University Contemporary Music Ensemble, and was resident conductor for ICMC 2011. From 2008–13 he served as conductor of the Symphony Orchestra and New Music Ensemble at the University of Huddersfield, where he also taught advanced undergraduate and postgraduate orchestral conducting students. He has recorded as a conductor for the Kairos and HCR labels, with two further releases forthcoming on Wergo.

While much of his work as a conductor over the last 25 years has revolved around new and experimental music, his earliest training was in choral conducting. He was appointed Assistant Conductor of the Texas Boys Choir while still an undergraduate, and later held positions as Organist & Choir Director while completing undergraduate and PhD degrees in composition in Chicago and Buffalo, also serving as the Assistant Conductor of the University Choir at SUNY Buffalo from 1998–99.

He also works frequently in educational settings, often in situations that foreground his experience as both conductor and composer, including for example two appearances in Ensemble Musikfabrik’s ‘Adventure’ series in partnership with the Hochschule für Musik und Tanz Köln, Ensemble Proton Bern’s ‘Protonwerk’ professional development program for young composers, ELISION’s residencies at the Center for 21st Century Music at the University at Buffalo and at the Incontri Institute for New Music in Hannover, and a ‘listening week’ residency with ELISION leading students of the Australian National Academy of Music in a performance of Liza Lim’s Extinction Events and Dawn Chorus.

His conducting teachers have included Zsolt Nagy, Peter Eötvös, Stephen Alltop, Erik Oña, and Ilan Volkov.

Video samples are available here.
A repertoire list is available here.