Martin Brody

2000 Guggenheim Fellowships: Martin Brody

Martin Brody has written music for the opera and ballet, chamber and orchestral genres, and television and film. His music has been performed extensively throughout the United States and in Western Europe and Russia. Brody has received a variety of commissions from orchestras and chamber ensembles, and his work has been honored with numerous awards. He has received the Academy-Institute Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, three fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and commissions from the Fromm Foundation at Harvard, the Artists Foundation, and the Massachusetts Arts and Humanities Council, among others. His first chamber opera, Heart of a Dog, was commissioned by the Boston Musica Viva and the National Endowment for the Arts; a second chamber opera, Earth Studies, was commissioned by the CORE Ensemble and the Duncan Theater, with funding from the MacArthur Foundation. Other recent projects include chamber works for Collage New Music, Triple Helix, the Crossounds Festival in Southern Alaska, and the Bank Boston Celebrity Series. Brody's music has been recorded on New World Records and Composers Recordings Incorporated and has been published by Margun Music and the Association for the Promotion of New Music. In addition to concert music, Brody has written extensively for film, where his credits include many of the movies of John Sayles.

Born in 1949 in Chicago and raised in Elgin, Illinois, Martin Brody studied cello and piano in his youth and later worked extensively as a jazz and rock musician. He began composing at Amherst College, graduating summa cum laude in 1972, and went on to receive the Doctorate in Musical composition from the Yale School of Music. His principal composition teachers were Yehudi Wyner, Robert Morris, Seymour Shifrin, and Lewis Spratlan. Brody has taught at Mount Holyoke, Bowdoin, and MIT, and is currently Catherine Mills Davis Professor of Music at Wellesley College, where he has been on the faculty since 1979.

Active as an advocate of contemporary music, Brody serves on the Board of Directors of the Composers Conference and Chamber Music Center, the Boston Musica Viva, the WGBH radio broadcast, "Art of the States," and the Lili Boulanger Society. He is currently president of the Stefan Wolpe Society. Brody has also served as a Director of the League of Composers-ISCM, the New England Computer Arts Association, and the New England Conference of Music Theorists. With the musicologist, Judith Tick, he co-founded the Seminar on Musical Culture at the Harvard Center for Literary and Cultural Studies in 1994. In 1987 he initiated a US-USSR composers exchange sponsored by the International Research and Exchanges Board with the ethnomusicologist, Ted Levin. Under the auspices of this program, Brody coordinated the first extended visit to Russia in 25 years by a group of American composers.

Martin Brody has also been widely acknowledged for his contribution as a music theorist and critic. His numerous articles on contemporary music have appeared in such publications as Perspectives of New Music, Musical Quarterly, Journal of Music Theory, Boston Review, Cognition, andComputer Music Journal.