Derek Bermel

This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page . (Learn how and when to remove these messages) This article includes a list of general references, but it lacks sufficient corresponding inline citations . Please help to improve this article by introducing more precise citations.(January 2010) ( Learn how and when to remove this message ) This biography of a living person needs additional citations for verification . Please help by adding reliable sources. Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately from the article and its talk page, especially if potentially libelous. Find sources:  "Derek Bermel"  –  news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (January 2010) ( Learn how and when to remove this message ) ( Learn how and when to remove this message )

Derek Bermel (born 1967, in New York City) is an American composer, clarinetist and conductor whose music blends various facets of world music, funk and jazz with largely classical performing forces and musical vocabulary. He is the recipient of various awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship ^[1] and the American Academy in Rome's Rome Prize awarded to artists for a year-long residency in Rome. ^[2]

Contents

• Life
• Music
• Chamber works
• Orchestral works
• Symphonic Band
• Choral works
• Songs
• Solo Instrument
• References
• External links

Life

Bermel earned his B.A. at Yale University and later studied at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor with William Bolcom and William Albright. ^[3] He also studied with Louis Andriessen in Amsterdam and Henri Dutilleux at Tanglewood. Later, his interest in a wide range of musical cultures sent him to Jerusalem to study ethnomusicology with André Hajdu, Bulgaria to investigate Thracian folk style with Nikola Iliev, Brazil to learn caxixi with Julio Góes, and to Ghana to study Lobi xylophone with Ngmen Baaru. ^[4]

Bermel's output includes pieces for a variety of performing forces, including solo vocal songs, pieces for large and small chamber ensembles, and fourteen orchestral works. ^[5] Though the ensembles he writes for are largely classical, his voice as a composer has been heavily influenced by both his travels and his education in Western art and popular music. His orchestral work A shout, a whisper, and a trace is a good example of this interplay, as it draws on Bermel's knowledge of the Thracian folk style and the work of fellow ethnomusicologist and classical composer Béla Bartók. Moreover, the piece engages directly with the experience of living in an unfamiliar culture, drawing on Bartók's letters home from New York during the last five years of his life. ^[6] He first came into the national spotlight with works like Natural Selection, a series of animal portraits for baritone and ensemble, and Voices, a concerto for clarinet and orchestra which he wrote for himself to perform. The piece was premiered by the American Composers Orchestra under the baton of the composer/conductor Tan Dun and has since been performed by many other ensembles and conductors, including the Los Angeles Philharmonic under the baton of composer/conductor John Adams. Other important works include his "Migration Series," a piece for jazz band and orchestra that draws on impressions of Jacob Lawrence's set of 60 paintings by the same name depicting the mass movement of African-Americans from the South to the North at the beginning of the 20th century, ^[7] and "Soul Garden," a viola solo accompanied by string quintet that utilizes quarter-tones and slides to emulate the vocal effects of a gospel singer. ^{[8] [9]} "Soul Garden" in particular reflects what Richard Scheinen, jazz writer for the San Jose Mercury News, has called Bermel's preoccupation with "the human voice--or more generally, language and the yearning the communicate.". ^[10] This artistic concern is equally evident in lighter pieces such as "Language Instruction," a humorous work for clarinet, viola, cello, and piano in which the clarinet plays the role of the voice on a language tape and the other three instruments students with various degrees of aptitude for the task at hand. ^[11]

Bermel is also an accomplished clarinetist and plays both classical repertoire and rock and funk, performing with groups such as his own TONK. He also sings and plays keyboards and caxixi in the rock band Peace by Piece. ^[12] He has premiered and performed numerous pieces with large orchestras, including his own concerto Voices and John Adams Gnarly Buttons with the composer at the podium. ^[13]

Besides his work as a composer and performer, Bermel is active as a teacher. He founded and served as director of the New York Youth Symphony's Making Score workshop for young composers. The workshop meets twice a month at the ASCAP to study orchestration and composition. The group and has heard from guest lecturers such as Meredith Monk, Steve Reich, and John Corigliano and had pieces read by ensembles such as the American Composers Orchestra. ^[14] More recently, he has mentored both young composers and conductors at Carnegie Hall through the Weill Music Institute. ^[15] Bermel also conducts masterclasses at universities and music festivals such as the University of Michigan, University of Chicago, Yale University, Peabody Conservatory, Bowdoin, Tanglewood, and Aspen. ^[16]

Bermel's music is published by Peer Music Classical in the United States and is distributed in Europe, Australia and New Zealand by Faber Music. ^[17]

Bermel began a three-year residency with the American Composers Orchestra in Fall of 2006 and currently serves on the ACO board. ^[18] In 2009 Bermel began his three-year tenure as composer-in-residence with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra ^[19] as well as his position as artist-in-residence at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, where he currently lives and works. ^[20]

Bermel has collaborated with the novelist Sandra Cisneros to adapt her work The House on Mango Street , first in 2017 as an orchestral suite with monologues and choreography, and then as an opera with Cisneros as librettist. Mango Suite was commissioned for the Chautauqua Institution by Francis and Cindy Letro, in honor of Tom and Jane Becker, and had its world premier on July 22, 2017. ^[21] The opera will have its official premier in July 2025 at the Glimmerglass Festival in upstate New York. ^[22]

Music

Related Research Articles

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.

Grigory Samuilovich Frid, also known as Grigori Fried, was a Russian composer of music written in many different genres, including chamber opera.

Chen Yi is a Chinese-American composer of contemporary classical music and violinist. 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.

Simon Holt is an English composer.

Dan Welcher is an American composer, conductor, and music educator.

Margaret Brouwer is an American composer and composition teacher. She founded the Blue Streak Ensemble chamber music group.

Eduardo Alonso-Crespo is an Argentine composer of classical music.

Lior Navok is an Israeli classical composer, conductor and pianist. He was born in Tel Aviv. Navok studied composition privately with the Israeli composer Moshe Zorman, and completed a Bachelor's degree at the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance, where he studied composition and conducting. He later completed he studied for a Master's and Doctorate at the New England Conservatory, where he studied with John Harbison.

David Frederick Stock was an American composer and conductor.

Gary Alan Kulesha is a Canadian composer, pianist, conductor, and educator. Since 1995, he has been Composer Advisor to the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. He has been Composer-in-Residence with the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony (1988–1992) and the Canadian Opera Company (1993–1995). He was awarded the National Arts Centre Orchestra Composer Award in 2002.

Miguel del Águila is a prolific Uruguay-born American composer of contemporary classical music. He has been nominated three times for Grammys and has received numerous other awards.

Alexander Mikhailovich Raskatov is a Russian composer.

Marc-André Dalbavie is a French composer. He had his first music lessons at age 6. He attended the Conservatoire de Paris, where he studied composition with Marius Constant and orchestration with Pierre Boulez. In 1985 he joined the research department of IRCAM where he studied digital synthesis, computer assisted composition and spectral analysis. In the early 1990s he moved to Berlin. Currently he lives in the town of St. Cyprien and teaches orchestration at the Conservatoire de Paris.

Eduard Hayrapetyan is an Armenian composer of contemporary classical music and educator.

Fabian Müller is a Swiss composer.

David Serkin Ludwig is an American composer, teacher, and Dean of Music at The Juilliard School. His uncle was pianist Peter Serkin, his grandfather was the pianist Rudolf Serkin, and his great-grandfather was the violinist Adolf Busch. He holds positions and residencies with nearly two dozen orchestras and music festivals in the US and abroad. His choral work, The New Colossus, was performed at the 2013 presidential inauguration of Barack Obama.

Andreas Makris was a Greek-American composer and violinist, born in Kilkis, Greece, on March 7, 1930. He was a Composer-in-Residence for many years at the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington DC, working with conductors such as Howard Mitchell, Mstislav Rostropovich, Antal Dorati, and Leonard Slatkin. He composed around 100 works for orchestra, chamber ensembles, and solo instruments, including the Aegean Festival Overture, which, transcribed for concert band by Major Albert Bader of the USAF Band, became a popular piece with US bands. Grants and awards he received include the Damroch Grant, National Endowment for the Arts Grant, the Martha Baird Rockefeller Award, ASCAP Award, the Fulbright Scholarship, and citations from the Greek Government.

Jean François Toussaint Rogister was a Belgian virtuoso violist, teacher and composer.

Allan Gordon Bell, is a Canadian contemporary classical composer.

References

• http://dworkincompany.com/site/artist/derek-bermel/ Archived 2018-07-31 at the Wayback Machine

External links

Wikiquote has quotations related to Derek Bermel .

• Official website
• Peermusic Classical: Derek Bermel Composer's Publisher and Bio
• Derek Bermel management Archived 2018-07-31 at the Wayback Machine
• Discography Archived 2018-07-31 at the Wayback Machine
• Page at Faber Music Ltd (publishing agent for Europe, Australia & New Zealand)
• Inspirations - Derek Bermel blog