Lawrence Dillon (born July 3, 1959) is an American composer, and Composer in Residence at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts. His music has a wide range of expression, generally within a tonal idiom notable both for its rhythmic propulsiveness and a strong lyrical element. Acclaimed particularly for his chamber music, he has also written extensively for voice and large ensembles.
Dillon was born in Summit, New Jersey, the youngest of eight children raised by a widowed mother. He lost 50% of his hearing in an early childhood bout with chicken pox. Intrigued by his siblings' piano lessons, he began his own at age seven, and soon developed a habit of composing a new work for his lesson each week. In 1985, he became the youngest composer to earn a doctorate at The Juilliard School, winning the Gretchaninoff Prize upon graduation. He studied privately with Vincent Persichetti, and in classes with Milton Babbitt, Elliott Carter, David Diamond, Leon Fleischer and Roger Sessions. Other teachers included Edwin Finckel and James Sellars. As a student, he won an ASCAP Young Composers Award and first prize in the annual CRS New Music Competition. Upon graduation, he was appointed to the Juilliard faculty.
In 1990, Dillon was offered the position of Assistant Dean at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts where he is now Composer in Residence. His works are recorded on the Bridge, Naxos and Albany labels and published by American Composers Editions, a subdivision of BMI. In recent years, he has received increasing recognition for music that Gramophone called "arresting and appealing." In the last ten years, his compositions have been commissioned and performed by the Emerson String Quartet, Lauren Flanigan, the Ravinia Festival, the Daedalus String Quartet, the Lincoln Trio, the Seattle Chamber Music Society, the Cassatt String Quartet, the Kavafian/Jolley/Vonsattel Trio, Danielle Belén, Le Train Bleu, the Mansfield Symphony, the Boise Philharmonic, Wintergreen Summer Arts Festival, the Salt Lake City Symphony, the Quartetto di Sassofoni d'Accademia, the Winston-Salem Symphony, Low and Lower, the University of Utah and the Idyllwild Symphony Orchestra. From 1999-2014 he worked on the Invisible Cities String Quartet Cycle, a set of six quartets zooming in on individual aspects of the quartet tradition. [1]
Dillon has been a guest composer at numerous schools and festivals, including The Curtis Institute of Music, the St. Petersburg/Rimsky Korsakov Conservatory, SUNY Stony Brook, the Colburn School of Music, the Ravinia Festival, the Hartt School of Music, the Charles Ives Center, Seisen International School, Wintergreen Summer Arts Festival, Charlotte New Music Festival, Spoleto Festival and Indiana University.
Dillon was the Featured American Composer in the February 2006 issue of CHAMBER MUSIC magazine. He is a two-time winner of the North Carolina Artist Fellowship, the highest honor accorded to artists in the state.
Reviewers of Dillon’s music have repeatedly noted his arresting ideas, technical skill, lyricism and wit. In a review of his fourth string quartet, the Washington Post cited the work’s “jewel-like craftsmanship,” saying, “Dillon’s control of time was a conspicuously imaginative element throughout.” Gramophone called his recording Insects and Paper Airplanes “Sly and mysterious…just when you thought the string quartet may have reached the edge of sonic possibilities, along comes a composer who makes something novel, haunting and whimsical of the genre… Each score is an arresting and appealing creation, full of fanciful and lyrical flourishes…Highly recommended.” And Musicweb International commented on “music that is often profound without being pretentious, sometimes light-hearted but never 'lite', humorous without being arch, and immensely appealing but never frivolous." Fanfare magazine called him “an original in the best sense of the word.”
Dillon's blog [2] Infinite Curves was featured on Sequenza21.com for ten years before moving to ArtsJournal.
Shulamit Ran is an Israeli-American composer. She moved from Israel to New York City at 14, as a scholarship student at the Mannes College of Music. Her Symphony (1990) won her the Pulitzer Prize for Music. She was the second woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music, the first being Ellen Taaffe Zwilich in 1983. Ran was a professor of music composition at the University of Chicago from 1973 to 2015. She has performed as a pianist in Israel, Europe and the U.S., and her compositional works have been performed worldwide by a wide array of orchestras and chamber groups.
Joan Tower is a Grammy-winning contemporary American composer, concert pianist and conductor. Lauded by The New Yorker as "one of the most successful woman composers of all time", her bold and energetic compositions have been performed in concert halls around the world. After gaining recognition for her first orchestral composition, Sequoia (1981), a tone poem which structurally depicts a giant tree from trunk to needles, she has gone on to compose a variety of instrumental works including Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman, which is something of a response to Aaron Copland's Fanfare for the Common Man, the Island Prelude, five string quartets, and an assortment of other tone poems. Tower was pianist and founding member of the Naumburg Award-winning Da Capo Chamber Players, which commissioned and premiered many of her early works, including her widely performed Petroushskates.
Thomas Joseph Edmund Adès is a British composer, pianist and conductor. Five compositions by Adès received votes in the 2017 Classic Voice poll of the greatest works of art music since 2000: The Tempest (2004), Violin Concerto (2005), Tevot (2007), In Seven Days (2008), and Polaris (2010).
John Harris Harbison is an American composer and academic.
Jerod Impichchaachaaha' Tate is a Chickasaw classical composer and pianist. His compositions are inspired by North American Indian history, culture and ethos.
Richard Danielpour is an American composer and academic, currently affiliated with the Curtis Institute of Music and the University of California, Los Angeles.
Bernard Rands is a British-American contemporary classical composer. He studied music and English literature at the University of Wales, Bangor, and composition with Pierre Boulez and Bruno Maderna in Darmstadt, Germany, and with Luigi Dallapiccola and Luciano Berio in Milan, Italy. He held residencies at Princeton University, the University of Illinois, and the University of York before emigrating to the United States in 1975; he became a U.S. citizen in 1983. In 1984, Rands's Canti del Sole, premiered by Paul Sperry, Zubin Mehta, and the New York Philharmonic, won the Pulitzer Prize for Music. He has since taught at the University of California, San Diego, the Juilliard School, Yale University, and Boston University. From 1988 to 2005 he taught at Harvard University, where he is Walter Bigelow Rosen Professor of Music Emeritus.
Simon Holt is an English composer.
David Bruce is a British composer and YouTuber.
Margaret Brouwer is an American composer and composition teacher. She founded the Blue Streak Ensemble chamber music group.
Ransom Wilson is an American flutist, conductor, and educator.
Thomas M. Sleeper was an American composer and conductor. He was the Orchestra Conductor at Stetson University in DeLand, Florida from 1985 to 1993, and Director of Orchestral Activities and Conductor of the University of Miami Frost Symphony Orchestra until his retirement in 2018. He was also the director of the Florida Youth Orchestra from 1993 to 2020.
Jay Reise is an American composer.
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David Horne is a Scottish composer, pianist, and teacher.
Huw Thomas Watkins is a British composer and pianist. Born in South Wales, he studied piano and composition at Chetham's School of Music in Manchester, where he received piano lessons from Peter Lawson. He then went on to read music at King's College, Cambridge, where he studied composition with Robin Holloway and Alexander Goehr, and completed an MMus in composition at the Royal College of Music, where he studied with Julian Anderson. Huw Watkins was awarded the Constant and Kit Lambert Junior Fellowship at the Royal College of Music, where he used to teach composition. He is currently Honorary Research Fellow at the Royal College of Music.
Michael Rosenzweig, born 1951 in Cape Town, South Africa, is a composer, conductor, choral trainer and director, multi-instrumentalist and jazz musician.
Francisco Coll is a Spanish composer.
James Matheson is an American composer. His works have been commissioned and performed by the Albany Symphony Orchestra, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, New York Philharmonic, Borromeo String Quartet, Carnegie Hall and the St. Lawrence String Quartet. In December 2011, he received the Charles Ives Living from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, an award providing him with $100,000 for two years (2012-2014). Previously, he received the Academy’s Goddard Lieberson Fellowship in 2008 and Hinrichsen Award in 2002. He has also received awards from the Civitella Ranieri, Bogliasco and Sage Foundations, ASCAP, and the Robbins Prize. He was executive director of the MATA Festival of New Music in New York from 2005-2007 and has been a fellow at the Aspen Music Festival. Since September 2009, he has been the director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Composer Fellowship Program.
Michael Seltenreich is an Israeli composer of contemporary classical music based in New York City. He is known for his distinctive, rhythmically captivating and technically sophisticated music, blending elements of modernism and experimentation. His works have been performed by leading ensembles and orchestras around the world, including the Munich Philharmonic, the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Juilliard Orchestra. He earned commissions from staple institutions such as Lucerne Festival, Aspen Music Festival, and Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival. Seltenreich was the first Israeli to win the prestigious Toru Takemitsu Composition Award and is a recipient of the Israel Prime Minister Award in Composition. In 2022, he received the Music Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.