Rand Steiger (born June 18, 1957, in New York City) is an American composer, conductor, and pedagogue.
Steiger attended the Manhattan School of Music and the California Institute of the Arts, where he became a faculty member in 1982. In 1987, he joined the faculty of the University of California, San Diego, where he served as chair of the music department from 2006 to 2009.
At UCSD, Steiger was instrumental in overseeing the planning, development, and building of the music school's acclaimed Conrad Prebys Music Center.
In 2009, he was visiting professor in the music department at Harvard University.
As a composer, Steiger first won notice in the 1980s for his work Quintessence. [1] He was a fellow with the Los Angeles Philharmonic from 1987 to 1989, and has had compositions recorded by contemporary classical music ensembles recording for Centaur, CRI, Crystal, New Albion, and New World. His work often features elements of computer music and digital manipulation alongside traditional orchestral forces.
Steiger was the founding artistic director and a member of the California EAR Unit. He has also conducted contemporary ensembles such as the Arditti Quartet, Ensemble Sospeso, La Jolla Symphony, and the New York New Music Ensemble, and has conducted recordings on Einstein, Koch, Mode and Nonesuch.
In 2010 Steiger released a CD/DVD of works for instruments and electronics on the EMF label entitled Ecosphere. In 2014 the Talea Ensemble released another collection of his chamber music, A Menacing Plume, on New World Records.
The International Contemporary Ensemble premiered his Coalescence Cycle at a Composer Portrait concert at Miller Theater in New York in November 2013.
William Kraft was an American composer, conductor, teacher, timpanist, and percussionist.
Morten Johannes Lauridsen is an American composer and academic teacher. A National Medal of Arts recipient (2007), he was composer-in-residence of the Los Angeles Master Chorale from 1994 to 2001, and is the distinguished professor emeritus of composition at the University of Southern California Thornton School of Music, where he taught for fifty-two years until his retirement in 2019.
Wilfrid Howard Mellers was an English music critic, musicologist and composer.
Mario Davidovsky was an Argentine-American composer. Born in Argentina, he emigrated in 1960 to the United States, where he lived for the remainder of his life. He is best known for his series of compositions called Synchronisms, which in live performance incorporate both acoustic instruments and electroacoustic sounds played from a tape.
Michael Kevin Daugherty is an American composer, pianist, and teacher. He is influenced by popular culture, Romanticism, and Postmodernism. Daugherty's notable works include his Superman comic book-inspired Metropolis Symphony for Orchestra (1988–93), Dead Elvis for Solo Bassoon and Chamber Ensemble (1993), Jackie O (1997), Niagara Falls for Symphonic Band (1997), UFO for Solo Percussion and Orchestra (1999) and for Symphonic Band (2000), Bells for Stokowski from Philadelphia Stories for Orchestra (2001) and for Symphonic Band (2002), Fire and Blood for Solo Violin and Orchestra (2003) inspired by Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, Time Machine for Three Conductors and Orchestra (2003), Ghost Ranch for Orchestra (2005), Deus ex Machina for Piano and Orchestra (2007), Labyrinth of Love for Soprano and Chamber Winds (2012), American Gothic for Orchestra (2013), and Tales of Hemingway for Cello and Orchestra (2015). Daugherty has been described by The Times (London) as "a master icon maker" with a "maverick imagination, fearless structural sense and meticulous ear."
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.
The California EAR Unit was an American chamber ensemble dedicated to the performance of contemporary classical music. The group was founded in March 1981 in Los Angeles, California.
Donnacha Dennehy is an Irish composer and leader of the Crash Ensemble specializing in contemporary classical music. According to musicologist Bob Gilmore, Dennehy's "high profile of his compositions internationally, together with his work as artistic director of Dublin’s Crash Ensemble, has distinguished him as one of the best-known voices of his generation of Irish composers".
Michael Nathaniel Hersch is an American composer and pianist. He currently serves as faculty at the Johns Hopkins Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, Maryland, where he completed his own studies in music composition. The New York Times has commented that he writes "extraordinarily communicative music" and that "Mr. Hersch's music speaks for itself eloquently".
Vijay Iyer is an American composer, pianist, bandleader, producer and writer based in New York City. The New York Times has called him a "social conscience, multimedia collaborator, system builder, rhapsodist, historical thinker and multicultural gateway". Iyer received a 2013 MacArthur Fellowship, a Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, a United States Artists Fellowship, a Grammy nomination, and the Alpert Award in the Arts. He was voted Jazz Artist of the Year in the DownBeat magazine international critics' polls in 2012, 2015, 2016, and 2018. In 2014, he received a lifetime appointment as the Franklin D. and Florence Rosenblatt Professor of the Arts at Harvard University, where he was jointly appointed in the Department of Music and the Department of African and African American Studies.
Stephen Paul Hartke is an American composer. Hartke is best known as the composer of Meanwhile – Incidental Music to Imaginary Puppet Plays, winner of the Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Classical Composition in 2013.
Southwest Chamber Music is a chamber music ensemble based in Los Angeles County, California. The organization was founded in 1987 by the artistic director Jeff von der Schmidt and the executive director Jan Karlin. One of the most active chamber music ensembles in the United States, the ensemble performs year round, provides educational programs, tours internationally, and has recorded 30 compact discs.
David Alan Miller is a multi-Grammy Award-winning American symphony orchestra conductor, and since 1992, music director of the Albany Symphony Orchestra. Miller served as assistant and associate conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic from 1987–92 and music director of the New York Youth Symphony from 1982-88. He is currently also Artistic Advisor to The Little Orchestra Society in New York City.
Robert Carlisle Black was an American conductor, pianist and composer. He was most particularly associated with the promotion, performance and recording of contemporary classical music, but he also played and conducted the standard repertoire.
The Dr K–Sextett is a short, occasional composition for six instrumentalists, written in 1969 by Karlheinz Stockhausen and given the number 28 in his catalogue of works.
A Garland for Dr. K. is a set of eleven short compositions created in 1969 for the celebration of the eightieth birthday of Dr Alfred Kalmus, the director of the London branch of Universal Edition. It is also the title of an album containing these eleven pieces of music, recorded in 1976.
Jeff von der Schmidt is a Grammy Award-winning American conductor. He is the founding Artistic Director of Southwest Chamber Music and the Los Angeles International New Music Festival.
Andrew Norman is an American composer of contemporary classical music whose texturally complex music is influenced by architecture and the visual arts. His string trio The Companion Guide to Rome (2010), was a runner-up for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Music. While composer-in-residence for the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, he first gained international attention for the orchestral work Play (2013), which was nominated for the 2016 Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Classical Composition and won the 2017 Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition. He received another Grammy nomination for the orchestral work Sustain (2018), a commission from the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Other noted works include the fantasy for piano and orchestra Split (2015) and the opera A Trip to the Moon (2017). Since 2020, Norman has been on the composition faculty of the Juilliard School.
Harold Rosenbaum is an American conductor and musician. He is the artistic director and conductor of the New York Virtuoso Singers and the Canticum Novum Singers. The New York Virtuoso Singers appear on 48 albums on labels including Naxos Records and Sony Classical. He has collaborated extensively with many ensembles including the New York Philharmonic, Juilliard Orchestra, American Symphony Orchestra, Bang on a Can, Mark Morris Dance Group, Orchestra of Saint Luke's, Glyndebourne Festival Opera, Riverside Symphony, and Brooklyn Philharmonic.
Christopher Trapani is an American/Italian composer of contemporary classical music. In 2007 he won the Gaudeamus Award of the Dutch Gaudeamus Foundation. A CD of his music, Waterlines, was released in 2018. A second release of Waterlines by the Ictus Ensemble was named one of the top 5 classical releases of 2020 by De Standaard. In 2021–2022 he was a visiting assistant professor at the Thornton School of Music of the University of Southern California.