Aaron Dai | |||||||
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Born | 1967 (age 56–57) San Francisco, California, U.S. | ||||||
Education | University of Pennsylvania University of Houston Columbia University Mannes College of Music | ||||||
Occupations |
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Years active | 1996–present | ||||||
Chinese name | |||||||
Traditional Chinese | 戴海清 | ||||||
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Website | aarondai |
Aaron Dai (born August 3, 1967) is an American composer and pianist known for his orchestral and choral music. He is best known for his The Night Before Christmas [1] [2] for Narrator and Orchestra and his fifteen-minute miniature opera Hamlet. [3] [4] He is a founding member of and the resident composer for The Chelsea Symphony and has been the pianist for the New York City Gay Men's Chorus since October 2010. [5]
Dai is considered a polymath. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a degree in biology in 1989, after which he worked in neurotransmitter research in the field of molecular neuropharmacology. [6] He graduated from the University of Houston in 1995 and the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University in 1996 with graduate degrees in architecture and continues to work as an architect today. [7] [8] In 2005, he received a diploma in piano performance from the Mannes College of Music. [9] Dai is a member of Mensa, a social organization whose members are in the top 2% of intelligence. [10]
The San Francisco Symphony, founded in 1911, is an American orchestra based in San Francisco, California. Since 1980 the orchestra has been resident at the Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall in the city's Hayes Valley neighborhood. The San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra and the San Francisco Symphony Chorus (1972) are part of the organization. Michael Tilson Thomas became the orchestra's music director in 1995, and concluded his tenure in 2020 when Esa-Pekka Salonen took over the position.
Michael Tilson Thomas is an American conductor, pianist and composer. He is Artistic Director Laureate of the New World Symphony, an American orchestral academy in Miami Beach, Florida, Music Director Laureate of the San Francisco Symphony, and Conductor Laureate of the London Symphony Orchestra. He gave his last performance with the San Francisco Symphony in January 2024 while fighting brain cancer.
David Conte is an American composer who has written over 150 works published by E.C. Schirmer, including six operas, a musical, works for chorus, solo voice, orchestra, chamber music, organ, piano, guitar, and harp. Conte has received commissions from Chanticleer, the San Francisco Symphony Chorus, Harvard University Chorus, the Men’s Glee Clubs of Cornell University and the University of Notre Dame, GALA Choruses from the cities of San Francisco, New York, Boston, Atlanta, Seattle, and Washington, D.C., the Dayton Philharmonic, the Oakland Symphony, the Stockton Symphony, the Atlantic Classical Orchestra, the American Guild of Organists, Sonoma City Opera, and the Gerbode Foundation. He was honored with the American Choral Directors Association (ACDA) Brock Commission in 2007 for his work The Nine Muses, and in 2016 he won the National Association of Teachers of Singing (NATS) Art Song Composition Award for his work American Death Ballads.
George Theophilus Walker was an American composer, pianist, and organist, and the first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music, which he received for his work Lilacs in 1996. Walker was married to pianist and scholar Helen Walker-Hill between 1960 and 1975. Walker was the father of two sons, violinist and composer Gregory T.S. Walker and playwright Ian Walker.
Franz Schreker was an Austrian composer, conductor, librettist, teacher and administrator. Primarily a composer of operas, Schreker developed a style characterized by aesthetic plurality, timbral experimentation, strategies of extended tonality and conception of total music theatre into the narrative of 20th-century music.
Samuel Hans Adler is an American composer, conductor, author, and professor. During the course of a professional career which ranges over six decades he has served as a faculty member at both the University of Rochester's Eastman School of Music and the Juilliard School. In addition, he is credited with founding and conducting the Seventh Army Symphony Orchestra which participated in the cultural diplomacy initiatives of the United States in Germany and throughout Europe in the aftermath of World War II. Adler's musical catalogue includes over 400 published compositions. He has been honored with several awards including Germany's Order of Merit – Officer's Cross.
Jerod Impichchaachaaha' Tate is a Chickasaw classical composer and pianist. His compositions are inspired by North American Indian history, culture and ethos.
The Indiana University Jacobs School of Music in Bloomington, Indiana, is a music conservatory established in 1921. Until 2005, it was known as the Indiana University School of Music. It has more than 1,500 students, approximately half of whom are undergraduates, with the second largest enrollment of all music schools accredited by the National Association of Schools of Music.
Meriwether Lewis Spratlan Jr. was an American music academic and composer of contemporary classical music.
The Henry and Leigh Bienen School of Music is the music and performance arts school of Northwestern University. It is located on Northwestern University's campus in Evanston, Illinois, United States.
The Schulich School of Music is one of the constituent faculties of McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. It is located at 555, Rue Sherbrooke Ouest. The faculty was named after the benefactor Seymour Schulich.
Stephen Paulus was an American Grammy Award winning composer, best known for his operas and choral music. His style is essentially tonal, and melodic and romantic by nature.
The Night Before Christmas is an orchestral work written by the American composer Aaron Dai in 2006. The work is performed by a full orchestra and a narrator reading Clement Clarke Moore's 1823 poem 'Twas the Night Before Christmas.
John David Bryson Burge is a Canadian composer, music educator, and pianist. He has won a number of awards for his compositions, including the Alberta Culture Award (1982), the William Erving Fairclough Scholarship (1983), second prize in the Ithaca College Choral Composition Contest and Festival (1984), and five PROCAN Young Composers' Competition prizes between 1985 and 1988 among others. In 2009 he won the Juno Award for Classical Composition of the Year for his Flanders Fields Reflections. Some music critics have likened his compositional style to that of Benjamin Britten and Maxwell Davies.
Mason Wesley Bates is a Grammy award-winning American composer of symphonic music and DJ of electronic dance music. He is the first composer-in-residence of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and he has also been in residence with Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the San Francisco Symphony, the Pittsburgh Symphony, and the California Symphony. In addition to his notable works Mothership, Anthology of Fantastic Zoology, and The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs, he composed the score to Gus Van Sant's film The Sea of Trees. In a 2018 survey of American orchestras, he was rated the second-most performed living composer.
Victoria Ellen Bond is an American conductor and composer in New York City.
Jake Runestad is an American composer and conductor of classical music based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He has composed music for a wide variety of musical genres and ensembles, but has achieved greatest acclaim for his work in the genres of opera, orchestral music, choral music, and wind ensemble. One of his principal collaborators for musical texts has been Todd Boss.
Black conductors are musicians of African, Caribbean, African-American ancestry and other members of the African diaspora who are musical ensemble leaders who direct classical music performances, such as an orchestral or choral concerts, or jazz ensemble big band concerts by way of visible gestures with the hands, arms, face and head. Conductors of African descent are rare, as the vast majority are male and Caucasian.
Ondřej Kyas is a Czech composer and musician.
Justin Dello Joio,(born October 18, 1955, in New York City) is an American composer and the fifth-generation composer in the Dello Joio family.