well as poets Richard Howard and W.S. Merwin. Picker's conductor collaborators have included Leon Botstein, Peter Ash, James Conlon, Sergiu Comissiona, Edo De Waart, Lukas Foss, Giancarlo Guerrero, James Levine, George Manahan, Kurt Masur, Gil Rose, John Williams, Pinchas Zukerman and Christoph Eschenbach. He has also collaborated with pianists Jeremy Denk, Peter Serkin, Emmanuel Ax, and Ursula Oppens, who has championed Picker's work since 1977, as well as violist Paul Neubauer, cellists Lynn Harrell and Paul Watkins, and flutist Carol Wincenc. The sopranos Judith Bettina and Patricia Racette have been frequent collaborators. Picker has also worked with William Burden, Gerald Finley, Elizabeth Futral, Susan Graham, Nathan Gunn, Lucia Lucas, Jennifer Larmore, Diana Soviero, and Dolora Zajick. Personal life Picker's partner since 1980 has been Aryeh Lev Stollman. They were married on March 9, 2016, in a ceremony officiated by Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg at the United States Supreme Court. Picker has Tourette syndrome. He has mentioned that there are "tourettic" elements in his music. Picker appeared in a BBC Horizon television documentary, titled Mad But Glad, exploring a link between Tourette's syndrome and creativity, and has been involved in mentoring programs for children with Tourette's. Picker has tics which he says disappear when he is composing, playing the piano, or conducting. He has said, "I live my life controlled by Tourette's...but I use music to control it. I have harnessed its energy—I play with it, manipulate it, trick it, mimic it, taunt it, explore it, exploit it, in every possible way." Sacks wrote of the inspiration he took from Picker's music in the preface to his book, Island of the Color Blind, saying he "owe[d] a special debt to Tobias Picker's version of The Encantadas'', and that "whenever, in the writing, memory failed me, listening to the piece operated as a sort of Proustian mnemonic, transporting me back to the Marianas and the Carolines". References External links Tobias Picker at Schott Music Tobias Picker featured in Opera News Review of An American Tragedy (opera) by Alex Ross 1954 births Living people Manhattan School of Music alumni Princeton University alumni Musicians from New York City American male classical composers American classical composers American opera composers Male opera composers Ballet composers People with Tourette syndrome 20th-century classical composers 21st-century classical composers LGBT classical composers American LGBT musicians LGBT classical musicians LGBT people from New York (state) 21st-century American composers 20th-century