We are honored to have Martin Bresnick as one of the guest composers and instructors who will work with the eight resident composers taking part in the Mizzou New Music Summer Festival.
Bresnick (pictured) was born in New York City and educated at the High School of Music and Art, the University of Hartford, Stanford University, and the Akademie für Musik in Vienna. His principal teachers of composition included György Ligeti, John Chowning, and Gottfried von Einem.
He is presently Professor of Composition and Coordinator of the Composition Department at the Yale School of Music, and also has taught at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and Stanford University and as a visiting professor or guest lecturer at many other institutions.
Bresnick’s compositions cover a wide range of instrumentation, from chamber music to symphonic compositions and computer music. His orchestral music and chamber music have been performed by major symphony orchestras and ensembles throughout the US, Europe and Asia, and heard at numerous major festivals.
The recipient of dozens of prizes and commissions during his long and distinguished career, Bresnick also 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.
His 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. The most recent recording of Bresnick’s music, Every Thing Must Go, came out in June on Albany Records.
Bresnick’s notable students include Michael Gordon, David Lang, Julia Wolfe (co-founders of Bang on a Can), Evan Ziporyn, Kevin Puts, Marc Mellits, Christopher Theofanidis, Carlos Sanchez-Guiterrez and Michael Torke. “We do look at him as our guru,” says Lang of his former teacher. “He’s a really inspiring person.”
On a personal note, Bresnick is married to pianist Lisa Moore, who’s a guest performer at the 2010 Mizzou New Music Summer Festival. (You can see a short video here of a joint interview that Bresnick and Moore did in 2008 for the website New Music Box.)
For more about Bresnick, read this profile written in 2007 by the New York Times‘ Anne Midgette for the Yale Alumni Magazine. For more on his compositional process, check out this interview with Bresnick, in which Bresnick discusses his work “Grace,” a concerto for two marimbas and orchestra written for marimbist Robert Van Sice.
In the first embedded video window below, you can see and hear an excerpt of Moore and Third Coast Percussion performing Bresnick’s multi-media work “Caprichos Enfaticos” in a concert on February 14, 2010 at the Chicago Cultural Center. Below that, there’s a 2010 performance of the first movement of “Grace” by percussionists Brad Meyer and Ben Stiers, accompanied by pianist Beth Ellen Rosenbaum playing a reduction of the orchestral parts.