Biography
Tamar Diesendruck was born in August 3, 1946 in Tel Aviv, [1] and she later emigrated to the United States, where she grew up in New England. [2] In 1968, she obtained her BA at Brandeis University, [1] where she studied under Martin Boykan, Edward Cohen, and Seymour Shifrin. [2] After obtaining her MA at University of California, Berkeley in 1979, [1] she then remained there to get her PhD in Music Theory and Composition in 1983, [3] with her advisor being Andrew Imbrie. [4]
In 1989, Diesendruck's piece Such Stuff premiered at Carnegie Hall; Carmen Eisner of the Wisconsin State Journal praised it for "hold[ing] plenty of close calls for ears that don't like to take chances", [5] while John Rockwell of The New York Times criticized it for its perceived incoherence. [6] In 1990, she started her series of Tower of Babel-inspired pieces, with Susan Larson of The Boston Globe calling it "the framework for Diesendruck's search for a personal language". [7] One of these pieces, On That Day, when performed by the Dinosaur Annex Music Ensemble in 1991, was called "determinedly un-mysterious" by Richard Buell of The Boston Globe, [8] Robert Croan of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette called How/Feel the "most substantial and interesting work" of its respective 1993 Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble concert. [9] In 1997, Buell praised her next piece The Grief That Does Not Speak (in lower-case) for its quality but criticized it for "swallowing" several subsequent pieces. [10]
In 2007, she composed Sudoku Variations specifically for Elaine Chew; inspired from a sudoku hobby she recently undertook, its meter structure is inspired by the game's mathematical rules. [11] [12] She was a 2012-2013 Radcliffe Fellow. [13] She released two albums from Centaur Records: Quartets 1+2, [14] Theater of the Ear (2008) and The Grief That Does Not Speak (2011). [15] [16] David Patrick Stearns told the The Philadelphia Inquirer that her piece Other Floods, performed at the Philadelphia Episcopal Cathedral in 2013, had "leapt down curious musical rabbit holes [he] was unable to follow". [17]
She was a 1984 Fellow of the American Academy in Rome [18] and a 1986 Charles Ives Scholar. [19] She has been awarded the MacDowell Fellowship twelve times, in 1986, 1988, 1990, 1991, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1999, 2000, and 2023. [20] She also won a Library of Congress/Koussevitzky Music Foundation composition grant in 1988. [21] In 1999, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in music composition, [22] [1] as well as a Goddard Lieberson Fellowship. [19] She won an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in 2006. [19]
After teaching in several schools such as the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, San Francisco State University (where she worked as a lecturer in 1988 [21] ), New York University, University of Pittsburgh, and Chatham College, [1] she eventually joined the faculty of Berklee College of Music and became professor there. [3] At Berklee, she teaches classes in composition. [3]
As of 1999, she worked as a composer in Somerville, Massachusetts. [1] Her partner Eric Moe is a composer. [23]
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