Composer Anthony Brandt earned his degrees from California Institute of the Arts (M.A. '87) and Harvard University (B.A. '83, Ph.D. '93). 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 commissioned by the River Oaks Chamber Orchestra, the Metamorphosen Chamber Orchestra, Da Camera of Houston, the SOLI ensemble, Houston Ballet II, the Bowdoin International Festival, the Moores School of Music Percussion Ensemble, the Webster Trio, the Fischer Duo and others. He has been a fellow at the Wellesley Composers Conference, the Tanglewood Institute, MacDowell, and the Djerassi Resident Artist Colony. He’s been a visiting composer at many festivals and university music programs. Recent works include the chamber opera Ulysses, Home, with a libretto by playwright Neena Beber, about a soldier with post-traumatic stress disorder. An album of his vocal music, including his chamber opera The Birth of Something, with a libretto by playwright Will Eno, is available on Albany Records (Troy 1144). Brandt is co-founder and artistic director of the Houston-based contemporary music ensemble Musiqa, two-time winners of Adventurous Programming Awards from Chamber Music America and ASCAP (2013 and 2016). Musiqa’s free educational programs have served more than 50,000 public elementary school students and have won eight awards from the National Endowment for the Arts. He has co-authored papers published in the journals Frontiers and Brain Connectivity and serves on the Advisory Board of Methodist Hospital’s Center for Performing Arts Medicine, where he is a principal investigator in a research project involving music and stroke recovery. Brandt is a professor of composition and theory at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music, and has been awarded the University’s Phi Beta Kappa and George R. Brown teaching prizes.
Anthony Brandt
Studios
Irving Fine
Anthony Brandt worked in the Irving Fine studio.
Youngstown Studio was given to MacDowell by friends of Miss Myra McKeown in Youngstown, OH, where she promoted both art and music. It was renamed Irving Fine Studio in 1972 in honor of Irving Fine, a distinguished composer, conductor, and teacher who was a MacDowell Fellow during the 1940s and 1950s. The simple interior of the studio…