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

ANTHONY BRANDT (b. 1961) earned his degrees from California Institute of the Arts (MA, 1987), and Harvard University (BA, 1983; PhD, 1993). His recent honors include a commission from the Koussevitzky Music Foundation of the Library of Congress in 2000. In 2001-02, he was Composer-in-Residence of OrchestraX of Houston. He was chosen for the Djerassi Resident Artists Program Honorary Fellowship in 2002. Other honors include fellowships from the Wellesley Composers Conference, the Tanglewood Music Festival, and two from the MacDowell Colony. Performers of his music include the Bremen Kammerphilharmonie, the Ensemble Modern Leipzig, the Orchestre de Chambre Orphée of Belgium, the Metamophosen Chamber Orchestra, pianists Jon Kimura Parker, Christopher Taylor and Brian Connelly, soprano Karol Bennett, the Fischer Duo, the Webster Trio, and the Cassatt, Flux, Enso, Chiara and Amernet String Quartets. He has received grants from the Margaret Fairbank Jory Copying Assistance Program, Meet-the-Composer, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Houston Arts Alliance and the New England Foundation for the Arts.

He has been a guest composer at the Bremen Musikfest in Germany, the New Chamber Festival in Baltimore, the Bowdoin International Festival, and at Southwestern and Cleveland State Universities. He was also Composer-in-Residence at the International Festival of Music in Morelia, Mexico.

His chamber opera, "The Birth of Something," with a libretto by playwright Will Eno (Pulitzer Prize finalist, 2006) was commissioned and premiered by Da Camera of Houston in 2006. He composed the score for the television documentary, “Crucible of the Millennium,” which aired nationally on PBS in December and January 2001-02. 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. He was commissioned to reconstruct and orchestrate his late teacher Earl Kim’s last work, Illuminations, left incomplete at the composer’s death in 1998; the completed score was premiered by Karol Bennett and the Metamorphosen Chamber Orchestra in February 2003. His music-and-art piece for children, Inside/Out, received a special award for Design Collaboration from the Boston Society of Architects, and has been exhibited in Boston, Rhode Island, and Florence, Italy. Performances of his music have taken place in Belgium, the Far East, Germany, Mexico, the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., Carnegie Recital Hall in New York City, and throughout the United States.

Dr. Brandt is co-founder and President of Musiqa , a Houston-based contemporary music ensemble. Musiqa has been awarded consecutive national grants from the Aaron Copland Fund and the Argosy Foundation. Musiqa presents subscription concerts at the Hobby Center's Zilkha Hall and free concerts at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. In addition, Musiqa's educational program has been performed for over 10,000 public school students at the Hobby Center for the Performing Arts in the past three years. Dr. Brandt's other musical activities include liner notes for New World, Albany and Bridge Records and regular pre-concert lectures and program notes. Dr. Brandt has presented several joint lectures with Dr. David Rosenfield on music and the mind. He also presented a paper at a recent conference devoted to the music of Milton Babbitt at Millsaps College.

Dr. Brandt is currently Associate Professor of Composition at the Shepherd School of Music of Rice University. He has been awarded the university’s George R. Brown and Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Prizes . Thanks to grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Computer and Information Technology Institute at Rice, he has developed a web-based, interactive music appreciation course (http://www.soundreasoning.org). The course focuses on style-transcendent musical principles, illustrating them with side-by-side examples from the traditional and modern repertoires. Previously, Dr. Brandt held visiting faculty positions at Harvard University, Tufts University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.