Danny Fratina is a composer, trumpet player, and music theorist based in Pittsburgh and Istanbul. His work ties together improvisation and notation with themes of belonging, detachment, and control, incorporating the textures of coolness and panic, joy and fear, and perfection and disaster. He is the creator of the Beacon, an electronically augmented trumpet which incorporates gesture tracking and choreography-as-music into brass performance. His research centers on compositional systems in big band history.

His 2022 release Bb, in Isolation, is a collection of capturings of musicians in a moment in time balancing improvisation with the demands of notated music. His work has recently been played by ensembles like Ensemble Dal Niente, Unheard-of Ensemble, Nat28, Hezarfen Ensemble (Istanbul), and the University of Memphis New Music Ensemble. His arranging and transcription skills have led to collaborations with the Boston Pops, the University of Sydney, the New York Youth Symphony Jazz Band, the Plymouth Symphony, and the Cape Cod Symphony. He was a transcriptionist for the Harvard University Natural History of Song postdoctoral ethnographic project. In 2024, he was a featured composer at the RED NOTE New Music Festival. In 2025, he unveiled the first Beacon prototype at MOXsonic.

Danny received his MA in Composition from the Istanbul Technical University Centre for Advanced Studies in Music (MIAM) in Istanbul, Turkey, and holds a BM in Jazz Composition from the Berklee College of Music. From 2019 to 2022 he was Lecturer of Jazz Composition at the Istanbul University State Conservatory. He now lives in Pittsburgh with his partner ilkim, a brilliant anthropologist, and their dog Köfte, while he works on his PhD in Composition and Theory at the University of Pittsburgh.