Ronald Bass, the composer, has achieved an impressive array of performances and commissions by prestigious ensembles throughout the United States, among these: the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, the Cleveland Orchestra and the Boston Pops Orchestra.  His Gloria was premiered at Carnegie Hall in 1990 by the New York Pops Orchestra under Skitch Henderson; this same composition has been recorded by the Boston Pops Orchestra with Keith Lockhart and can be heard on their latest Christmas CD release, Holiday Pops.

His arrangement of Conquest of Paradise, by Vangelis, was commissioned by the Boston Pops Orchestra and can be heard on their 2000 CD re-release Summon the Heroes, under the baton of eminent film composer John Williams.  Additionally, his works have been performed by the Tanglewood Chorus, The Mormon Tabernacle Choir, the Grand Rapids Symphony and Chorus, the Dallas Symphony and Chorus as well as numerous other orchestras and choruses throughout the U. S. and Europe.  Active since the late 1970’s as an arranger, Mr. Bass is now focusing his talents on original composition, largely due to the demand for his music.  He has just completed an extensive Christmas cantata, commissioned and recently premiered by the First Methodist Church of Lancaster, PA.

Born in Fort Worth in 1953, Mr. Bass grew up in Midland, Texas, studying piano, working in community theater and singing with local choral ensembles. A longtime student of choral music, Mr. Bass earned his Bachelors Degree in 1976 from the University of Texas at Austin, a Master of Music degree in Choral Conducting in 1980 from The College-Conservatory of Music in Cincinnati, OH, and pursued doctoral studies in choral and wind conducting at both Ohio State University's Robert Shaw Institute and the University of Texas at Austin.

Mr. Bass has historically worked actively in his various communities to further the non-professional musician’s understanding and appreciation for the musical arts. He has founded several civic wind and choral groups during his career, helping to provide other musicians the opportunities he enjoyed as a young performer in civic orchestras, bands and theater groups. He founded the Austin Symphonic Band in 1982 and was its Music Director and Conductor for four years. That group continues to perform as the official musical ensemble for the City of Austin.

Mr. Bass currently serves as Music Director and Conductor for the Metropolitan Winds of Dallas, a community-based civic wind ensemble, regularly providing arrangements and compositions for that organization as well as other bands, choirs and orchestras in North Texas and elsewhere.

In the fall of 2003, Mr. Bass conducted the National Symphony of London and the Tallis Choir in a CD compendium of many of his Holiday compositions and arrangements, subsequently released under the title A Feast of Carols.
For more information...

Larry Bell

Recognized by The Chicago Tribune as "a major talent," composer Larry Bell has been awarded the Rome Prize, fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, and the Charles Ives Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and grants from the American Music Center, the American Symphony Orchestra League, and Meet the Composer. He has been a resident composer at Bennington College, the Woodstock/Fringe Festival, the American Academy in Rome, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Bellagio Study and Conference Center, and the MacDowell Colony.

Bell's music has been widely performed in the United States and abroad by such orchestras and ensembles as the Seattle Symphony, RAI Orchestra of Rome, Juilliard Philharmonia, Boston Modern Orchestra Project, Ruse Philharmonia (Bulgaria), Hopkins Symphony Orchestra, University of Miami Symphony, ÖENM (Salzburg Mozarteum), Boston Chamber Music Society, Speculum Musicae, St. Luke's Chamber Ensemble, New York New Music Ensemble,Borromeo String Quartet, North/South Consonance, and Music Today (NYC), as well as at festivals in Ravinia, Aspen, Valencia (Spain), Pontino (Italy), San Salvador, Russia (Moscow Autumn), and New Zealand. The Juilliard String Quartet premiered Bell's first String Quartet, written when the composer was only twenty-one. Bell's music has been commissioned and performed by a distinguished array of performers including Eric Bartlett, Joel Krosnick, Andres Diaz, Ayano Ninomiya, Sara Davis Buechner, D'Anna Fortunato, John Muratore, and conductors Jorge Mester, Gerard Schwarz, Gil Rose, and Benjamin Zander. He and his music have also been the subject of documentaries on National Public Radio's "New Directions in Europe," and Concertzender, Radio Amsterdam. Recordings of Bell's works appear on North/South Recordings, Barking Dog Records,Vienna Modern Masters, New England Conservatory Recordings, Pont Neuf, and Albany Records.

As a pianist, Bell performs his music regularly and has championed works by American composers. He has given recitals throughout the United States, as well as in Italy, Austria, and Japan. Bell is frequently heard on Boston's WGBH-FM radio, has given their first live broadcast on the World Wide Web of his trio Mahler in Blue Light, and performed as soloist on CDs of his Piano Concerto and Piano Sonata and as an assisting artist on the recordings River of Ponds (the complete cello music), The Book of Moonlight (the complete violin music) and Larry Bell Vocal Music. Bell's music is published by Casa Rustica Publication and Ione Press, a division of ECS Publishing. His work is licensed for performance through Broadcast Music, Inc (BMI) and he is represented by Rosalie Calabrese Management.

Bell received his DMA from The Juilliard School, working in composition with Vincent Persichetti and Roger Sessions, in solfège with Renée Longy, piano with Joseph Bloch and with Joseph Rollino privately in Rome. He later taught in Juilliard's Pre-College Division. Bell is chair of music theory at the New England Conservatory of Music Division of Preparatory and Continuing Education. Larry Bell resides in Boston and is married to musicologist Andrea Olmstead.
For more information...

William Bergsma

William Bergsma was a major contributor to the American music scene during his lifetime. His legacy and influence remain a vital force these many years after his death.
Bergsma composed works for symphony orchestra, opera, chamber ensembles, solo instruments and choral groups, most of which has been recorded and continues to be available. He received numerous honors and awards, including the Guggenheim Fellowship and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Foundation. In 1992, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

In the New Grove Dictionary of American Music, Kurt Stone describes Bergsma's music as "resourceful and imaginative, essentially tonal, texturally conventional and predominantly lyrical."

Born in Oakland, California in 1921, he began his piano studies with his mother, a former opera singer, and also studied viola before concentrating on composition. At sixteen, he had his first composition lessons with Howard Hanson. Later Bergsma studied with Hanson at the Eastman School of Music as well as with Bernard Rogers. From 1938 to 1940, he attended Stanford University but went on to complete his B.A. at Eastman, where he also earned his M.A. in 1943. From 1946 to 1963, he served on the faculty at The Juilliard School in a variety of roles, most notably as chair of the composition department. From 1963 to 1971, Bergsma was chair of the School of Music at the University of Washington, where he remained as professor after retiring from administration.
For more information...

Robert Bode is Professor of Music, Alma Meisnest Professor of Humanities and Head of Choral/Vocal Studies at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington, where he has been on the faculty since 1986. He received his doctorate in choral conducting from the Cincinnati College‑Conservatory of Music. In 1982, Bode studied in Wales as a Conducting Fellow at the University‑College of Music in Cardiff.

Bode made his Carnegie Hall conducting debut in 1990, conducting the Walla Walla Symphony Chorale in the New York premiere of The Waking  by John David Earnest. In March 1995, Dr. Bode conducted the Walla Walla Mastersingers in performances for the American Choral Directors Association National Convention at Kennedy Center and Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C. In March 1997, Bode conducted a series of televised concerts with the Yunnan Provincial Chorus in Kunming, China.  In February 2000, he prepared the chorus of the National Opera of Mongolia for the first English‑language production of Porgy and Bess in Ulaan Bataar, Mongolia. An active orchestral conductor, Robert Bode is Music Director of the Mid‑Columbia Symphony in Richland, Washington. 

In addition, he is the Music Director for Zephyr Ensemble in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and the Composer's Reading Chorus in New York City. Dr. Bode is an accomplished poet. In 2002 he won the Washington State Poets Association prize for his poem Cuisine d’Amour. This  poem has been set to music for solo voice and piano by John David Earnest. Other collaborations with Earnest  include three cycles for solo voice and piano, Crickets and Commas, In Tomorrow’s Fields, and Songs of Sophistication; and the choral works Night and In Dreams.

Thomas Bold

Thomas Bold began the formal study of piano at the age of twelve. He continued the study of piano and music theory at Texas Christian University, Fort Worth, Texas in the early 1970s. He was a member of the vocal ensemble Chanticleer when it received its first Grammy Award in 1999.

Settling in New England, he utilizes state-of-the-art brain-function research in the teaching of music. Mr. Bold serves both Immaculate Conception Church and Wesley United Methodist Church in Salem, Massachusetts as organist and choirmaster.

Roger Bourland (b. 1952) received his education from the University of Wisconsin/Madison (B.Mus),the New England Conservatory of Music (M.M.), and Harvard University (A.M., Ph.D.). His teachers have included Leon Kirchner, Gunther Schuller, Donald Martino, John Harbison, and Randall Thompson. He received the Koussevitzky Prize in Composition at Tanglewood, the John Knowles Paine Fellowship at Harvard, two ASCAP Grants to Young Composers, numerous Meet the Composers grants, and was a co-founder of the Boston-based consortium "Composers in Red Sneakers." Bourland has composed over one hundred works for all media: solo, instrumental, chamber, vocal and choral music, electro-acoustic music, and music for orchestra, wind ensemble, and other large ensembles, which are published by Yelton Rhodes Music, ECS Publishing, Dorn Publications, Inc. and Associated Music Publishers, Inc. His works have been recorded on Northeastern Records, 1750 Arch, OpenLoop, Cambria, and GM Recordings.

As a film composer, he has scored "The Wolf at the Door" (1987, CBS/Fox Videocassettes), "The Trouble with Dick" (1986, Academy Video), "Night Life" (1988, RCA/Columbia Videocassettes),  James Merrill's "Voices from Sandover" (1990), and in 2005, Bourland scored a new film entitled "Cages" directed by Graham Streeter. In 1991 he scored a 13-part radio series for National Public Radio entitled "Poets in Person," and received his second National Endowment for the Arts grant for a CD of saxophone music. From 1992 to 1994, Bourland received commissions for three full-length cantatas ("Hidden Legacies," "Flashpoint/Stonewall," (both with librettist John Hall), and "Letters to the Future") from five GALA Choruses which have been performed throughout America. Two documentaries were created and televised on the impact of "Hidden Legacies" on gay men's choruses. In 1993, Bourland established Yelton Rhodes Music, a publishing house for choral music. In 1994, he was commissioned to compose "Ozma" in honor of the 50th anniversary of the Topeka Symphony Orchestra. Rosarium a drama for chorus" a 2 hour work for chorus, soloists, and orchestra with a libretto by William MacDuff, was premiered in 1999 at UCLA's Royce Hall. In 2000, Bourland and MacDuff fulfilled a commission for the US Navy's choral ensemble, The Sea Chanters entitled "Keeping the Ocean Free" in honor of their 45th anniversary which received its premiere on June 2001 in Washington D.C.. In 2001, Bourland's "Four Painters," scored for piano quartet, was premiered by the Los Angeles Chamber ensemble, Pacific Serenades. For the post 9/11 2001-2 concert season, Bourland and MacDuff composed "The Crocodile's Christmas Ball and other odd tales" which was premiered by the UCLA Wind Ensemble and Chorale with the composer conducting.

For the 2004-5 concert season, Bourland had four new works premiered: "The Night Train" commissioned by the St Matthews Chamber Orchestra, Thomas Neenan, conductor, a new song cycle premiered by Juliana Gondek  entitled "Four Apartsongs",  an arrangement of Mozart's "Trauermusik" for wind ensemble, performed by the UCLA Wind Ensemble, Thomas E. Lee, conductor,  and "A More Perfect Union," with lyrics by Philip Littell, commisioned by the Boston Gay Men's Chorus  premiered in Boston and Poland. During 2006, Bourland has two new works scheduled for premieres: "Four XmasSongs" to be premiered by Juliana Gondek and Neal Stulberg,  and his recent commission from the Ives Quartet, "Four Painters: String Quartet No.1" on May 11, 12 in San Jose and Palo Alto. Bourland is currently working on two new commissions: "Alarcon Madrigals, Book 3," for Vox Femina, Los Angeles, and the Thornton Wilder Estate has just commissioned him to compose two small operas based on two Wilder short plays.

At UCLA, Dr. Bourland is a Professor and the Chair of the Composition program in the Department of Music where he has taught since 1983. He teaches Composition, Music Theory, Orchestration, Music Technology, and other courses in the curriculum. As an administrator at UCLA, Bourland has served as the Chair of the Committee on Committees (1997-98, and 2001 - 2003),  the Chair of the Faculty Executive Committee in the Arts (5 yrs), and was the President of the UCLA Faculty Center (2005-6). Bourland received the UCLA Distinguished Teaching Award for 2005-6. Beginning in April 2006, Bourland will be on sabbatical working on a new book, The Music of Rufus Wainwright,  and composing a large cycle of new songs.
For more information...