DONALD GRANTHAM
Professor of Composition
dgrantham@utexas.edu (link sends e-mail)
Office Phone: 512-471-0522
Office Location: MRH F5.130
Specialties: Composition
Donald Grantham, Professor of Composition, is the recipient of numerous awards and prizes in composition, including the Prix Lili Boulanger, the Nissim/ASCAP Orchestral Composition Prize, First Prize in the Concordia Chamber Symphony's Awards to American Composers, a Guggenheim Fellowship, three grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, and First Prize in the National Opera Association's Biennial Composition Competition. Dr. Grantham's music has been praised for its "elegance, sensitivity, lucidity of thought, clarity of expression and fine lyricism" in a Citation awarded by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. In recent years his works have been performed by the orchestras of Cleveland, Dallas, Atlanta and the American Composers Orchestra among many others, and he has fulfilled commissions in media from solo instruments to opera. Dr. Grantham's music is published by Peer-Southern, E. C. Schirmer and Mark Foster, and a number of his works have been commercially recorded. With Kent Kennan, Professor Grantham is coauthor of The Technique of Orchestration (Prentice-Hall).
BRUCE PENNYCOOK
Professor of Composition
Director, The Center for Arts and Entertainment Technologies
Chair, The Digital Arts and Media Bridging Disciplines Program
bpennycook@austin.utexas.edu (link sends e-mail)
Office Phone: 512-471-0916
Office Location: MRH 4.180
Specialties: Composition electroacoustic composition film scoring interactive media
Bruce Pennycook is a Professor in Composition, especially electronic music and media and is the Director of the Center for Arts and Entertainment Technologies in the College of Fine Arts. Dr. Pennycook specializes in new media and audio technologies including music visualization, film/video music, interactive music performance and network-based audio.
He received a Doctor of Musical Arts at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics, Stanford University in 1978 then taught at Queen's University in Canada from 1978-1987 in both the Department of Music and the Department of Information and Computer Science. From 1987 to 1999, Pennycook taught at McGill University in Montreal where he developed new undergraduate and graduate degree programs in Music, Media and Technology. From 1998-2000 he held the position of Vice-Principal for Information Systems and Technology, McGill University.
Pennycook's compositions include electroacoustic and acoustic pieces for solo, chamber and large ensemble and these are widely performed in the US and Canada. He has published many articles on various aspects of music technology and new music practices. He has also worked as a consultant for government, industry and other post-secondary institutions in the US and Canada.
RUSSELL PINKSTON
Professor of Composition
Director, Electronic Music Studios
rpinkston@austin.utexas.edu (link sends e-mail)
Office Phone: 512-471-0865
Office Location: MRH 4.156
Specialties: Composition
Russell Pinkston, Professor of Composition, Director, Electronic Music Studios, holds degrees in music composition from Dartmouth College (BA) and Columbia University (MA, DMA). He has written music in a wide variety of different media, ranging from concert works and sacred anthems to computer generated tape pieces and live electronic music for dance. His compositions have been played throughout Europe, South America and the United States, including recent performances by such noted ensembles as the Smith Quartet (London), the Kansas City Symphony Orchestra, and the Danish Royal Ballet Company. Dr. Pinkston has received numerous awards for his compositions, including two prizes from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and a senior Fulbright Fellowship in Composition and Computer Music to Brazil. Dr. Pinkston is also active in computer music research. His work in the area of real-time performance interfaces for modern dance has recently attracted international attention, leading to interviews on BBC radio and NPR, as well as a feature article in New Scientist magazine. Dr. Pinkston's music is recorded on Boston Skyline, Centaur, Finnadar, Folkways, and Summit Records and published by Galaxy Music, E. C. Schirmer, and Columbia University Press.
YEVGENIY SHARLAT
Associate Professor of Composition
ysharlat@mail.utexas.edu (link sends e-mail)
Office Phone: 512-471-2479
Office Location: MRH 4.138
Specialties: Composition
Yevgeniy Sharlat has composed music for orchestra, chamber ensembles, solo, theater, ballet, and film. His recent composition – PIANO QUARTET – was hailed as "one of the most compelling works to enter the chamber music literature in some time" by the Philadelphia Inquirer. He was the recipient of the 2006 Charles Ives Fellowship from American Academy of Arts and Letters; other honors include a Fromm Music Foundation Commission, ASCAP's Morton Gould, Boosey & Hawkes, and Leiber & Stoller awards, Yale University's Rena Greenwald Award, fellowships from MacDowell and Yaddo.
His music was played by such ensembles as Kremerata Baltica, the Seattle Symphony, the Hartford Symphony, Seattle Chamber Players, Chamber Orchestra Kremlin, among others. Some of his recent commissions came from Gilmore Keyboard Festival, Seattle Chamber Players, Astral Artistic Services, and LA Piano Duo.
Mr. Sharlat was born in Moscow, Russia, in 1977. He majored in violin, piano, and music theory at the Academy of Moscow Conservatory. After immigrating to the United States in 1994, he studied composition at the Juilliard Pre-College, Curtis Institute of Music (BM) and Yale University (MM, DMA). His teachers included Aaron Jay Kernis, Martin Bresnick, Joseph Schwantner, Ned Rorem, and Richard Danielpour.
Mr. Sharlat is an Associate Professor at the University of Texas at Austin, where he teaches composition and music theory.
DAN WELCHER
Professor of Composition
dwelcher1@me.com (link sends e-mail)
Office Phone: 512-471-0943
Office Location: MRH 4.124
Specialties: Composition
In 2012, the American Academy of Arts and Letters presented to Dan Welcher an Arts and Letters Award in Music. The citation reads, in part, “As intense as it is elegant, Dan Welcher’s music takes his listeners on a surprising yet inevitable path….Every work in his wide-ranging catalogue is written with the strongest musical signature”. That catalogue now numbers well over 100 works in every conceivable genre, including three operas, seven concertos, five symphonies; plus vocal literature, piano solos, and various kinds of chamber music. Born in 1948 in Rochester, New York, Dan Welcher is now one of the most-played composers of his generation.
Dan Welcher has won numerous awards and prizes from institutions such as the American Academy of Arts and Letters, The Guggenheim Foundation, The National Endowment for the Arts, The Reader's Digest/Lila Wallace foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation, Meet The Composer, The MacDowell Colony, The Camargo Foundation, The Corporation at Yaddo, The Atlantic Center for the Arts, the American Music Center, and ASCAP. From 1990 to 1993, he was Composer in Residence with the Honolulu Symphony Orchestra (Donald Johanos, Music Director). His orchestral music has been performed by more than sixty orchestras, including the BBC Symphony, the Chicago Symphony, the Boston Symphony, the St. Louis Symphony, the Atlanta Symphony, the San Francisco Symphony, and the Dallas Symphony. His ballet for two antiphonal string quartets, MUSEON POLEMOS, was premiered by the Miró String Quartet and the Shanghai String Quartet in 2012.
A much sought-after speaker who is known for making contemporary music intelligible to lay listeners, Welcher hosted a weekly radio program called "Knowing The Score" on KMFA-FM in Austin from 1999 to 2009. This program won the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award for Excellence in Classical Broadcasting. He now hosts the weekly program “From The Butler School of Music” on Saturday evenings at 8:00 on KMFA. Dan Welcher holds the Lee Hage Jamail Regents Professorship in Fine Arts at the Butler School of Music (The University of Texas at Austin), where he directs the New Music Ensemble.
