Joseph Schwantner

About Joseph Schwantner

If there's any more gorgeous contemporary music than Joseph Schwantner's I've yet to hear it...for sheer beauty of sound it's unsurpassed. One could also add that Schwantner has a canny theatrical sense—his music is always at some level dramatic, never abstract—and that his characteristic idiom, a blending of modal melody with both enriched triadic and highly chromatic harmonies, minimalist ostinatos, and prismatic, floridly ornamented scorings, is used with so much skill and resourcefulness that the listener never notices how disparate are the elements thus unified. Everything works to create the desired sensuous and emotional effusion.
– Mark Lehman, The American Record Guide

Born in Chicago in 1943, Joseph Schwantner received his musical and academic training at the Chicago Conservatory and Northwestern University. While developing a profile as a leading American composer, he also served on the faculties of The Juilliard School, Eastman School of Music and the Yale School of Music, simultaneously establishing himself as a sought after composition instructor. His music is noted for its deft implementation of luminous color and fluctuating rhythms in a dramatic and unique style.

Schwantner has enjoyed particular success in the orchestral world. His Concerto for Percussion and Orchestra, among the most often performed of contemporary concert works, was commissioned for the 150th anniversary season of the New York Philharmonic. New Morning for the World: Daybreak of Freedom on words from Martin Luther King, Jr. for narrator and orchestra has entered the standard repertory of orchestras nationwide. Following the premiere of Schwantner’s Morning’s Embrace by the National Symphony Orchestra in 2006, The Washington Post praised the work's “delicate timbres” and “unique and original” sound. In 2007, Schwantner was selected as the composer for the second cycle of Ford Made in America, the nation's largest commissioning consortium of orchestras spearheaded by the League of American Orchestras and Meet the Composer. The resulting work, Chasing Light… received its world premiere with the Reno Chamber Orchestra in September of 2008 and completed its tour of over fifty orchestras in all fifty states in the Fall of 2010.

Schwantner’s music has been championed by such conductors as Leonard Slatkin, Marin Alsop, Andrew Litton, Hugh Wolff and artists including Evelyn Glennie, Sharon Isbin and Anne Akiko Meyers, among many others. He has been commissioned by numerous leading orchestras and organizations including the National Symphony Orchestra, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra, San Diego Symphony, Chamber Music America, Fromm Music Foundation, Naumburg Foundation, Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra and the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, among many others.

Schwantner’s compositional career has been marked by numerous distinctions and awards. His early accolades include three BMI Student Composer Awards, the Bearns Prize, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, and many other awards, grants and fellowships. His orchestral composition Aftertones of Infinity was awarded the 1979 Pulitzer Prize in Music. In 1985 his life and music were the focus of a television documentary entitled "Soundings", produced by WGBH in Boston for national broadcast. That same year his work, Magabunda (Witchnomad) “Four Poems of Agueda Pizarro", recorded on Nonesuch Records by the St. Louis Symphony, was nominated for a 1985 Grammy Award in the category “Best New Classical Composition,” and his A Sudden Rainbow, also recorded on Nonesuch by the St. Louis Symphony, received a 1987 Grammy nomination for “Best Classical Composition.” Schwantner is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Recent major works include Concerto No. 2 for Percussion Section, Timpani and Orchestra, which premiered with the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra and Hans Graf as the headline event at the Percussive Arts Society's 50th annual convention, Dream Drapery "Thoreau Songs", premiered in 2012 by contralto Karen Clark and the Galax Quartet, and Chapel Music, five diverse songs for chorus and orchestra, commissioned by Northwestern University for the 50th Anniversary of Alice Millar Chapel, and premiered at the university in 2013, under the direction of Stephen Alltop. Schwantner's Luminosity, commissioned by the CBDNA (College Band Director's National Association) with support by members of a consortia organized by Dr. Nikk Pilato, Emory University, premiered in 2015 with Pilato leading the Emory University Wind Ensemble.

The music of Joseph Schwantner is published by Schott Helicon Music Corporation.