Bernard Rands


Bernard Rands is a British and American contemporary classical composer. He studied music and English literature at the University of Wales, Bangor, and composition with Pierre Boulez and Bruno Maderna in Darmstadt, Germany, and with Luigi Dallapiccola and Luciano Berio in Milan, Italy. He held residencies at Princeton University, the University of Illinois, and the University of York before emigrating to the United States in 1975; he became a U.S. citizen in 1983. In 1984, Rands's Canti del Sole, premiered by Paul Sperry, Zubin Mehta, and the New York Philharmonic, won the Pulitzer Prize for Music. He has since taught at the University of California, San Diego, the Juilliard School, Yale University, and Boston University. From 1988 to 2005 he taught at Harvard University, where he is Walter Bigelow Rosen Professor of Music Emeritus.
Rands has received many awards for his work, and was elected and inducted into The American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2004. From 1989 to 1995 he was composer-in-residence with the Philadelphia Orchestra. Rands's music is widely recorded. The recording of his Canti D'Amor by the men's vocal ensemble Chanticleer won a Grammy Award in 2000. Rands is married to American composer Augusta Read Thomas.
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Works

Opera

Orchestral

Chamber

Vocal

Choral

Solo instrumental

  • Tre Espressione, for piano
  • Formants 1 - Les Gestes, for harp
  • Memo 1, for contrabass
  • :commissioned by Barry Guy; premièred at the English Bach Festival, Oxford in 1972
  • Memo 2, for trombone
  • Memo 3, for cello
  • Memo 4, for flute
  • :commissioned by Ekkehart Trenknner for Judith Pierce, who gave the work's première in 1997
  • Memo 5, for piano
  • Memo 6, for alto saxophone
  • Memo 7, for female voice
  • Memo 8, for oboe
  • HBDZ, for piano
  • Preludes, for piano
  • ''Three Piano Pieces''

Music theatre

  • Ballad 2, for female voice & piano
  • :commissioned by Jane Manning
  • Ballad 3, for soprano & tape
  • Memo 2B, for trombone and female mime
  • Memo 2D, for trombone, string quartet and female mime

Educational

  • Sound Patterns 1, for voices & hands
  • Sound Patterns 2, for voices, percussion and miscellaneous instruments
  • Per Esempio, for youth orchestra
  • Sound Patterns 3, for voices
  • Sound Patterns 4, for miscellaneous instrumental groups
  • Agenda, for youth orchestra

Awards

In 2014 Rands was inducted to The Lincoln Academy of Illinois as a Laureate of the Arts and was awarded the Order of Lincoln by the governor of Illinois.

Listening

  • two works by the composer