Robert Beaser was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1954. He 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 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, Arthur Weisberg and William Steinberg at Yale, and composition with Betsy Jolas on a Margaret Lee Crofts Fellowship from Tanglewood in 1976. From 1978 to 1990 he was co-Music Director and Conductor of the contemporary chamber ensemble Musical Elements at the 92nd Street Y, bringing premieres of over two hundred works to New York City. From 1988 to 1993 he served as the Meet The Composer/Composer-in-Residence with the American Composers Orchestra, and is currently the ACO's Artistic Advisor. Mr. Beaser is Professor and Chairman of the Composition Department at The Juilliard School in New York.
In recent years, Mr. Beaser has emerged as a major voice in a new generation of American composers. Since 1982, when The New York Times wrote that he possessed a “lyrical gift comparable to that of the late Samuel Barber,” his music has won praise for its balance between melodic sweep and architectural clarity. He is often cited as an important figure among the “New Tonalists”—composers who are adapting new tonal grammar to their own uses—and through a wide range of media has firmly established his own language as a synthesis of European tradition and American vernacular. Beaser's compositions have earned him numerous awards and honors. His first orchestral composition was performed by the Greater Boston Youth Symphony under his own direction at Jordan Hall in Boston when he was 16. In 1977, he became the youngest American 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 and Institute of Arts and Letters, a Charles Ives Scholarship, an ASCAP Composers Award, a Nonesuch Commission Award and honors in the Stroud Competition in England.
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), the Chicago Symphony (Centennial commission), the Saint Louis Symphony, the American Composers Orchestra, and the Baltimore Symphony for Dawn Upshaw. Recent orchestral performances have come from the Chicago, Saint Louis and Baltimore Symphonies, the New York Philharmonic, the American Composers Orchestra, the Crakow Philharmonic, the Monte Carlo Philharmonic, the Gelders Orchestra, the Dutch Radio Symphony, the Rome Radio Symphony, the Hong Kong Philharmonic with James Galway, the New Orchestra of Westchester, the Phoenix Symphony, the Florida Symphony, the Charleston Symphony, the New World Symphony, and the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra. Other recent chamber performances have occurred at the Aspen, Ojai, Berlin, Musica di Asolo, and Lockinhaus Festivals, Meet the Moderns at BAM, the Seattle and Saint Louis Symphony Chamber Music Series, the Chamber Music Societies of Lincoln Center, Baltimore and Chicago, the Twentieth Century Consort, the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, Solisti New York, the Chicago Contemporary Players, and the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble. His music has been performed, recorded and commissioned by artists such as Leonard Slatkin, Paula Robinson, Richard Stoltzman, Eliot Fisk, Manuel Barrueco, Pamela Mia Paul, Gilbert Levine, Lukas Foss, Paul Sperry, Alasdair Neale, James Galway, Richard Dufallo, Dawn Upshaw, Enrique Diemecke, Ransom Wilson, Kenneth Jean, Tsung Yeh, David Zinman, Paul Dunkel, Gerard Schwarz, and Dennis Russell Davies. Additionally, Mr. Beaser currently serves on the Board of Trustees of the American Academy in Rome, the MacDowell Colony, and the American Composers Orchestra.
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