专题资料：美国著名作曲家罗伯特-比瑟讲座
Robert Beaser, Bio
Robert Beaser has emerged as one of the most accomplished creative musicians of his generation. Since1982, when the New York Times wrote that he possessed a ”lyrical gift comparable to that of the late Samuel Barber,” his music has won international acclaim for its balance between dramatic sweep and architectural clarity. He is often cited as an important figure among the ”New Tonalists”—composers who are adopting new tonal grammar to their own uses—and through a wide range of media has established his own language as a synthesis of Western tradition and American vernacular. Beaser’sorchestral CD on London/Argo has garnered considerable attention prompting Gramophone magazine to call his music ”Masterly...dazzlingly colorful, fearless of gesture... beautifully fashioned and ingeniously constructed。” The Baltimore Sun writes ”Beaser is one of this country’s huge composing talents, with a gift for vocal writing that is perhaps unequaled。” His recent opera The Food of Love, with a libretto by Terrence McNally, is part of the Central Park Trilogy, which opened to worldwide critical
accolades at Glimmerglass and New York City Opera. The San Francisco Chronicle called his opera ”gripping” and ”arresting... a masterful score with beautiful rhapsodic turns, canny pacing, pungent orchestral writing and magnificently shapely arias。” The Arizona Republic called it ”a masterpiece” and USA Today wrote: ”Beaser’s glistening, percussion-tinged orchestral textures and utterly singable melodies are a joy to hear at every turn。” Televised nationally on PBS Great Performances, it received an Emmy nomination in 2000。
Born in Boston, Massachusetts, Beaser studied literature, political philosophy and music at Yale College,graduating summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa in 1976. He went on to earn his Master of Music, M.M.A. and Doctor of Musical Arts degrees from the Yale School of Music. His principal composition teachers have included Jacob Druckman, Earle Brown, Toru Takemitsu, Arnold Franchetti, Yehudi Wyner and Goffredo Petrassi. In addition, he studied conducting with Otto-Werner Mueller, and William Steinberg at Yale, and composition with Betsy Jolas on a Crofts Fellowship at Tanglewood in 1976. From 1978–1990 he served as co-Music Director and Conductor of the innovative contemporary chamber ensemble Musical Elements at the 92nd Street Y, bringing premieres of over two hundred works to Manhattan. From 1988–1993 he was the Meet the Composer/Composer-in-Residence with the American Composers Orchestra at Carnegie Hall, and has served as the ACO’s artistic director until January 2001, when he assumed the role of Artistic Director. Since 1993, he has been Professor and Chairman of the Composition Department at the Juilliard School in New York。
Beaser’s compositions have earned him numerous awards and honors. At the age of 16, his first orchestral work was performed by the Greater Boston Youth Symphony under his own direction at Jordan Hall in Boston. In 1977 he became the youngest composer to win the Prix de Rome from the American Academy in Rome. In 1986, Beaser’s widely heard Mountain Songs was nominated for a Grammy Award in the category of Best Contemporary Composition. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim and Fulbright Foundations, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Goddard Lieberson Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Charles Ives Scholarship, an ASCAP Composers Award, a Nonesuch Commission Award and a Barlow Commission. In 1995, when the American Academy of Arts and Letters honored him with their lifetime achievement award, the Academy Award in music they wrote: ”His masterful orchestrations, clear-cut structures, and logical musical discourse reveal a musical imagination of rare creativity and sensitivity…and put him in the forefront of his generation of composers。”
Beaser’s music has been performed and commissioned with regularity both in America and abroad. He has received major commissions from the New York Philharmonic (150th Anniversary Commission)， the Chicago Symphony (Centennial Commission)， the Saint Louis Symphony, The American Composers Orchestra, The Baltimore Symphony and Dawn Upshaw, The Minnesota Orchestra, Chanticleer, New York City Opera, Glimmerglass, and WNET/Great Performances among others. Recent major orchestral performances have come from the Chicago, Saint Louis and Baltimore Symphonies, The Minnesota Orchestra, The New York Philharmonic, the American Composers Orchestra, the Vienna Radio Orchestra, the Dutch Radio Symphony and the Hong Kong Philharmonic with James Galway. His music has been performed, recorded and commissioned by artists such as Leonard Slatkin, Paula Robison, Richard Stoltzman, Eliot Fisk, James Galway, Lauren Flanigan, John Aler, Ransom Wilson, Carol Wincenc, Dawn Upshaw, David Zinman, Gerard Schwarz, Dennis Russell Davies, Christopher Taylor, Manuel Barrueco, Renée Fleming, Lukas Foss, Paul Sperry, Kim Kashkashian, Alasdair Neale, Stewart Robertson, and Big Bird。
Beaser's most recent works include the orchestral work Evening Prayer, commissioned by Federico Cortese and the Boston Youth Symphony Orchestra, and Guitar Concerto, written for guitarist Eliot Fisk and premiered by Fisk with David Alan Miller and the Albany Symphony Orchestra. His principal recorded works include The Seven Deadly Sins, Chorale Variations, and Piano Concerto (London/Argo)， The Heavenly Feast (Milken Archives)， Song of the Bells (New World Records)， Notes on a Southern Sky (EMI-Electrola)， Mountain Songs (Musicmasters, Koch, Gajo, Siemens, HM Records— Venezuela)， and Landscape With Bells (Innova). He is recorded as a conductor of Musical Elements on the CRI label. In addition to his activities as a composer and conductor, Beaser has been a guest lecturer at a numberof universities and festivals, and was the co-issue editor for the Contemporary Music Review issue entitled ”The New Tonality。”
