Composer Tamar Diesendruck

Tamar Diesendruck's favored compositional medium is virtuosic chamber music, although she has also composed solo, orchestral and vocal works. Her music is often characterized as having a very wide range of expression. Works include experimental pieces like "8 —> ∞" for eight cellos (eight tends toward infinity), and unusually slow, stark music like "the grief that does not speak". Prof. Diesendruck's work has been performed throughout the U.S., and in Europe, by an array of excellent performers including the Pro Arte Quartet, Boston Modern Orchestra Project, Lions Gate Trio, Speculum Musicae, New Millenium Ensemble, Dinosaur Annex, Phantom Arts Ensemble, San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, New Century Players, League of Composers-ISCM, Earplay, Musica D'Oggi, Composers, Inc., Parnassus, Washington Square Contemporary Music, Prism Players, Music on the Edge, San Francisco Chamber Singers, Pittsburgh Youth Symphony Orchestra, Cabrini Quartet, pipa virtuoso Wu Man, avant garde violinist Carla Kihlstedt, pianist Donald Berman, and numerous other groups and soloists.

Prof. Diesendruck earned an M.A. and Ph.D. in Composition from the University of California, Berkeley and a B.A. from Brandeis University. Her work has been supported with a series of grants, fellowships, commissions and residencies, most notably a Guggenheim Fellowship, Bunting Fellowship awarded by the Radcliffe Institute, Rome Prize awarded by the American Academy in Rome, Koussevitzky Foundation Commissions, Fromm Foundation Commission, Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellowship, the Academy Award, Goddard Lieberson Fellowship, and Ives Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Copland Fund Recording Grants, several grants from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and numerous residencies at The MacDowell Colony, Bellagio (Rockefeller Foundation), Yaddo, and the Djerassi Foundation. Currently she is on the Composition faculty at the University of Southern California Thornton School of Music in Los Angeles, having previously taught at the New England Conservatory, Berklee College of Music, and University of Pittsburgh.