Composer Martin Bresnick was born in New York City in 1946 and he is presently Professor of Composition and Coordinator of the Composition Department at the Yale School of Music. He was educated at the High School of Music and Art, the University of Hartford (B.A. ’67), Stanford University (M.A. ’68, D.M.A. ’72), and the Akademie für Musik, Vienna (’69-’70). His principal teachers of composition include György Ligeti, John Chowning, and Gottfried von Einem. Mr. Bresnick has taught at many schools in the United States and Europe, including at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (1971-72), Eastman School of Music (2002-2003), New College in Oxford (2004), and the Royal Academy of Music in London (2005), among others. In 2006, Mr. Bresnick was also elected to membership of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Mr. Bresnick’s compositions cover a wide range of instrumentation, from chamber music to symphonic compositions and computer music. His orchestral music has been performed by major symphonies around the world, including the San Francisco Symphony, St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, Münster Philharmonic, Orquestra Sinfonica do Estado de Sao Paulo, and Izumi Sinfonietta Osaka. His chamber music has been performed in concert by The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Da Capo Chamber Players, Bang on A Can All Stars, and MusicWorks! among others.

His music has been heard at numerous festivals, including Prague Spring, Tanglewood, Banff, New Music America, and New Horizons. He has also received commissions from the National Endowment for the Arts (1992), Fromm Foundation (1995), Lincoln Center Chamber Players (1997), Meet-the-Composer (1998), and Chamber Music America (1999).

He has received many prizes, including the Elise L. Stoeger Prize from the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center (1996), Charles Ives Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1998), the ASCAP Foundation’s Aaron Copland Prize for teaching (2000), and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2003).

Mr. Bresnick has written music for films, two of which, Arthur & Lillie(1975) and The Day After Trinity (1981), were nominated for Academy Awards in the documentary category (both directed by Jon Else). Mr. Bresnick’s music has been recorded by Cantaloupe Records, Composers Recordings Incorporated, Centaur, New World Records, Artifact Music and Albany Records and is published by Carl Fischer Music (NY), Bote and Bock, Berlin and CommonMuse Music Publishers, New Haven.

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Aaron Jay Kernis

Aaron Jay Kernis is winner of the coveted 2012 Nemmers Prize and 2002 Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition, and one of the youngest composers ever awarded the Pulitzer Prize. Since 2003 he has taught composition at the Yale School of Music, where he is Professor (Adjunct) of Composition.

Kernis’s music is featured prominently on orchestral, chamber, and recital programs worldwide, and he has been commissioned by many of America’s foremost performing artists, including sopranos Renée Fleming and Dawn Upshaw, violinists Joshua Bell and Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, and guitarist Sharon Isbin, and by institutions including the New York Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, Minnesota Orchestra, the Los Angeles and Saint Paul chamber orchestras, Walt Disney Company, Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and Rose Center for Earth and Space at the Museum of Natural History in New York.

Kernis was awarded the Stoeger Prize from the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Rome Prize, and he received Grammy nominations for Air and his Second Symphony. His music is widely available on CDs, including the labels Naxos, Decca, Koch, Dorian, Phoenix, Virgin Classics, New Albion, Cedille, Nonesuch, Arabesque, and Innova.

He served as new music adviser to the Minnesota Orchestra for ten years and as chairman and director of the Minnesota Orchestra Composer Institute. In 2011 he was named to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

 

 

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David Lang

The music of David Lang has been performed by major musical, dance, and theatrical organizations throughout the world, including the Santa Fe Opera, the New York Philharmonic, the San Francisco Symphony, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Kronos Quartet, the Nederlands Dans Theater, and the Royal Ballet, and has been performed in the most renowned concert halls and festivals in the United States and Europe.

He is well known as cofounder and co-artistic director of New York’s legendary music festival Bang on a Can. David Lang received the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for the little match girl passion, commissioned by Carnegie Hall for the vocal ensemble Theater of Voices, directed by Paul Hillier.  His recent works include love fail for the early music vocal ensemble Anonymous 4, with libretto and staging by Lang, at the Kennedy Center, UCLA and the Next Wave Festival at BAM; reason to believe, for Trio Mediaeval and the Norwegian Radio Orchestra; death speaks, for Shara Worden, Bryce Dessner, Nico Muhly, and Owen Pallett, at Carnegie Hall; writing on water for the London Sinfonietta, with libretto and visuals by English filmmaker Peter Greenaway; and the difficulty of crossing a field, a fully staged opera with the Kronos Quartet.  The CD of the little match girl passion, on Harmonia Mundi, won the 2010 Grammy Award for Best Small Ensemble Performance.

Lang was Musical America’s Composer of the Year for 2013 and held Carnegie Hall’s Richard and Barbara Debs Chair in Composition for the 2013–2014 season. He holds degrees from Stanford University and the University of Iowa and received the D.M.A. from the Yale School of Music in 1989. He has studied with Jacob Druckman, Hans Werner Henze, and Martin Bresnick. His music is published by Red Poppy (ASCAP) and is distributed worldwide by G. Schirmer, Inc.

Professor Lang joined the Yale faculty in 2008.

 

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Hannah Lash

Prize-winning composer Hannah Lash has emerged as a leading voice of her generation. In addition to numerous academic awards, she has received the ASCAP-Morton Gould Young Composer Award, a Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a fellowship from Yaddo Artist Colony, the Naumburg Prize, the Bernard Rogers Prize, and the Bernard and Rose Sernoffsky Prize. She has received commissions from the Fromm Foundation, the Naumburg Foundation, the Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival, Aspen Music Festival, the Orpheus Duo, the Howard Hanson Foundation, Case Western Reserve’s University Circle Wind Ensemble, MAYA, Great Noise Ensemble, and the Aspen Contemporary Ensemble.

Her orchestral music has been singled out by the American Composers Orchestra, which selected Furthermore for the 2010 Underwood New Music Readings, and by the Minnesota Orchestra, which selected her work God Music Bug Music for performance in January 2012 as part of the Minnesota Composers Institute. Her chamber opera Blood Rosewas presented by NYC Opera’s VOX in the spring of 2011.

Lash’s music has also been performed at Carnegie Hall, Le Poisson Rouge, the Chelsea Art Museum, Harvard University, Tanglewood Music Center, the Times Center, and the Chicago Art Institute.

Hannah Lash earned a bachelor’s degree in composition from the Eastman School of Music, her Ph.D. from Harvard University, a performance degree from the Cleveland Institute of Music, and an Artist Diploma from the Yale School of Music. Her primary teachers include Martin Bresnick, Bernard Rands, Julian Anderson, and Robert Morris. Her music is published by Schott.

 

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Christopher Theofanidis

Christopher Theofanidis (b. 1967) regularly writes for a variety of musical genres, from orchestral and chamber music to opera and ballet.  His work Rainbow Body, which is loosely based on a melodic fragment of Hildegard of Bingen, has been programmed by over 120 orchestras internationally. Mr. Theofanidis’s works have been performed by such groups as the New York Philharmonic, the London Symphony, the Philadelphia Orchestra, and the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, and he has a long-standing relationship with the Atlanta Symphony and Maestro Robert Spano. His Symphony No. 1 has just been released by that orchestra on disc.

Mr. Theofanidis has written widely for the stage, from a work for the American Ballet Theatre, to multiple dramatic pieces, including The Refuge for the Houston Grand Opera and Heart of a Soldier with Donna DiNovelli for the San Francisco Opera.  His large-scale piece, The Here and Now, for soloists, chorus, and orchestra, based on poetry of Rumi, was nominated for a Grammy Award in 2007.

Mr. Theofanidis is currently on the faculty of the Yale School of Music and has taught at the Peabody Conservatory and the Juilliard School.  He is also a fellow of the US-Japan’s Leadership Program. Upcoming works include the opera Siddhartha for the Houston Grand Opera, a new work for the Miró String Quartet for Chamber Music Monterey Bay in collaboration with the multimedia artist Bill Viola, and a evening-length oratorio, called Creation/Creator for the Atlanta Symphony and Chorus. He was recently commissioned to write the required solo piano work for the fiftieth anniversary of the Van Cliburn Competition.