ANTHONY BRANDT
Associate Professor of Composition and Theory

B.A. Cum Laude (1983) Harvard University M.A. (1987) California Institute of the Arts Ph.D. (1993) Harvard University 1601 Alice Pratt Brown Hall 713-348-2192 abrandt@rice.edu

Composer ANTHONY BRANDT (b. 1961) earned his degrees from California Institute of the Arts and Harvard University. His honors include a Koussevitzky Commission from the Library of Congress and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Meet-the-Composer, the Houston Arts Alliance, the New England Foundation for the Arts and the Margaret Fairbank Jory Copying Assistance Program. He has been a fellow at the Wellesley Composers Conference, the Tanglewood Institute, the MacDowell Colony and the Djerassi Resident Artists Colony. He has been a Visiting Composer at the Bowdoin International Festival, the Bremen Musikfest, Baltimore’s New Chamber Arts Festival, Southwestern University, SUNY- Buffalo and Cleveland State University and Composer-in-Residence of Houston’s OrchestraX and the International Festival of Music in Morelia, Mexico. His chamber opera, The Birth of Something, with a libretto by Will Eno (Pulitzer Prize finalist, 2005) was commissioned and premiered by Da Camera of Houston. It will be released on Albany Records in the fall of 2009.

Dr. Brandt was commissioned to reconstruct and orchestrate his teacher Earl Kim’s last work, Illuminations, left incomplete at the composer’s death in 1998. He also composed the score for the documentary Crucible of the Millennium, which was broadcast nationally on PBS. The program was awarded “Platinum Award – Best in Show” at the Aurora International Film and Video Festival, and has also won awards from AXIOM, the United States International Film and Video Festival and CHRIS.

Dr. Brandt is co-founder and President of the Houston-based contemporary music ensemble Musiqa (www.musiqahouston.org). Musiqa has earned two awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and been featured on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered. Dr. Brandt is the author of an innovative, web-based music appreciation course called “Sound Reasoning” (www.soundreasoning.org), created for the Connexions Project. “Sound Reasoning” was awarded an Access to Artistic Excellence Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Dr. Brandt has also written liner notes for New World, Bridge and Albany Records. A frequent speaker on music and the mind, Dr. Brandt is on the Advisory Board of Methodist Hospital’s Center for Performing Arts Medicine and organized a conference at Rice on “Exploring the Mind through Music” in March 2009.

Dr. Brandt is an Associate Professor of Composition at the Shepherd School of Music. He was awarded the University’s George R. Brown Award for Superior Teaching in 2007 and the Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Prize in 2001. Previously, he held visiting positions at Harvard University, Tufts University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.