Richard Festinger (born 1 March 1948) is an American composer of contemporary classical music, pianist and educator.
Festinger was born in Newton, Massachusetts. He received his B.A. in music, magna cum laude, from San Francisco State University, and his Ph.D. in music composition from the University of California, Berkeley. He was the founding director of Earplay, a new chamber music ensemble based in the Bay Area. He has been a resident artist at the MacDowell Colony, Camargo Foundation, Cité internationale des arts in Paris, Yaddo, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Study Center, the Ligurian Study Center in Bogliasco, Italy, Fundación Valparaíso, Mojácar, Almeria, Spain, Ucross Foundation Centre International d’Accueil et d’Échanges des Récollets, the Aaron Copland House, the Oberpfälzer Künstlerhaus, and the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing. He was commissioned by the Fromm Foundation in 2003 [1] to compose his work Hidden Spring for the Cygnus Ensemble. Also in 2003 Works and Process at the Guggenheim commissioned and premiered his settings of poet/author Denis Johnson, The Coming of Age with Amy Burton, soprano and The Group for Contemporary Music conducted by Bradley Lubman. [2] In 2009 pianist Marilyn Nonken toured with Festinger's large scale piano solo, Le Pianiste. [3]
Early in his career Festinger played guitar and toured with folk singer Joan Baez including a performance at Woodstock. [4] Shortly afterwards, intent on pursuing a performing career in jazz, he attended the Berklee School of Music in Boston, where he studied composition with Herb Pomeroy and improvisation with Gary Burton. Returning to San Francisco in 1972 he performed extensively for several years as a jazz guitarist while pursuing a growing interest in classical music and composition. Festinger earned his B.A. from San Francisco State and later his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley where he worked with Andrew Imbrie. Festinger is Professor of Theory and Composition at San Francisco State University, where he is also the artistic director of the Morrison Artists Chamber Music Series.
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A musical ensemble, also known as a music group or musical group, is a group of people who perform instrumental and/or vocal music, with the ensemble typically known by a distinct name. Some music ensembles consist solely of instrumentalists, such as the jazz quartet or the orchestra. Other music ensembles consist solely of singers, such as choirs and doo wop groups. In both popular music and classical music, there are ensembles in which both instrumentalists and singers perform, such as the rock band or the Baroque chamber group for basso continuo and one or more singers. In classical music, trios or quartets either blend the sounds of musical instrument families or group together instruments from the same instrument family, such as string ensembles or wind ensembles. Some ensembles blend the sounds of a variety of instrument families, such as the orchestra, which uses a string section, brass instruments, woodwinds and percussion instruments, or the concert band, which uses brass, woodwinds and percussion.
Alfred Whitford (Fred) Lerdahl is the Fritz Reiner Professor Emeritus of Musical Composition at Columbia University, and a composer and music theorist best known for his work on musical grammar and cognition, rhythmic theory, pitch space, and cognitive constraints on compositional systems. He has written many orchestral and chamber works, three of which were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for Music: Time after Time in 2001, String Quartet No. 3 in 2010, and Arches in 2011.
John Harris Harbison is an American composer, known for his symphonies, operas, and large choral works.
Brian Cherney is a Canadian composer currently residing in Montreal, Quebec.
James Dillon is a Scottish composer who is often regarded as belonging to the New Complexity school. Dillon studied art and design, linguistics, piano, acoustics, Indian rhythm, mathematics and computer music, but is self-taught in composition.
Chen Yi is a Chinese-American violinist and composer of contemporary classical music. She was the first Chinese woman to receive a Master of Arts (M.A.) in music composition from the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing. Chen was a finalist for the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Music for her composition Si Ji, and has received awards from the Koussevistky Music Foundation and American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2010, she was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from The New School and in 2012, she was awarded the Brock Commission from the American Choral Directors Association. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2019.
John E. Ferritto was an American composer, conductor, and music professor.
Éric Gaudibert was a Swiss composer.
Matthew John Hindson AM is an Australian composer.
Roberto Sierra is a Puerto Rican composer of contemporary classical music.
Donald Henry Kay AM is an Australian classical composer.
Lior Navok is an Israeli classical composer, conductor and pianist. He was born in Tel Aviv. His music has been performed internationally by orchestras and ensembles including the Oper Frankfurt, Nuernberg Opera, Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, Boston Modern Orchestra Project, and the Tanglewood Festival Orchestra. Amongst the awards he has received are those from the Israel Cultural Excellence Foundation and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. He has also received awards from the Fromm Music Foundation, Lili Boulanger Memorial Fund Award, and Israel Prime Minister Award. In 2004, he was one of seven composers awarded commissions for new musical works by the Serge Koussevitzky Foundation in the Library of Congress and the Koussevitzky Music Foundation.
David Frederick Stock was an American composer and conductor.
Jiří Teml is a Czech composer and radio producer.
Ivan Fedele is an Italian composer. He studied at the Milan Conservatory.
Richard David Carrick is an American composer, pianist and conductor. He was a Guggenheim Fellow in Music Composition for 2015–16 while living in Kigali, Rwanda. His compositions are influenced by diverse sources including traditional Korean Gugak music, the flow concept of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Gnawa Music of Morocco, Jazz, experimental music, concepts of infinity, the works of Italo Calvino and Ludwig Wittgenstein, and his work as improviser.
