Department of Music Lecture: Martin Bresnick, Professor of Composition and Coordinator of the Composition Department at the Yale School of Music

Biography:

Composer Martin Bresnick is Professor of Composition and Coordinator of the Composition Department at the Yale School of Music. His works range from opera, chamber and symphonic music to film scores and computer music. Bresnick delights in reconciling the seemingly irreconcilable, bringing together repetitive gestures derived from minimalism with a harmonic palette that encompasses both highly chromatic sounds and more open, consonant harmonies and a raw power reminiscent of rock. At times his musical ideas spring from hardscrabble sources, often with a very real political import. But Bresnick’s compositions never descend into agitprop; one gains their meaning by the way the music itself unfolds, and always on its own terms. Bresnick is the recipient of multiple prizes and commissions, the first Charles Ives Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, The Rome Prize, The Berlin Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Koussevitzky Commission.