ABOUT

Composer Eugene O’Brien

With his music hailed by critics as “very engaging and incantatory” (New York Times), “alluring with sunbaked, evanescent imagery, punctuated by glittering stabs of color” (New York Times), “one of those rare pieces which creates a lovely continuity” (San Francisco Chronicle), “a carefully crafted message of subtlety and refinement” (Cleveland Plain Dealer), and praised for its “beautiful, spontaneous quality” (Cincinnati Enquirer), Eugene O’Brien has been noted as a composer of “extraordinary talent and imagination” (Il Messaggero, Rome).

The recipient of the Award in Music of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Rome Prize of the American Academy in Rome, as well as awards from BMI, ASCAP, the League of Composers, and the International Society for Contemporary Music, Mr. O’Brien has received Guggenheim, Rockefeller, Fulbright, National Endowment for the Arts and other fellowships, two commissions from the Fromm Music Foundation at Harvard University,  and commissions from the Serge Koussevitzky Foundation in the Library of Congress, by Meet-the-Composer / Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest Fund, and from many American, Asian and European performers and ensembles.

His music has been heard in concerts by the Cleveland Orchestra, the Italian Radio (RAI) Orchestras of Rome and Turin, the Omaha Symphony, as part of the Saint Louis Symphony Discovery series, the Louisville Orchestra New Dimensions series, and in numerous other concerts and festivals throughout this country and abroad. Recorded on the New Focus, CRI, Golden Crest, Crystal, Fontec, Capstone and Indiana University labels, his works are published by Codex Nuovo, G. Schirmer, and Boosey & Hawkes. Biographies and descriptions of his work are included in The New Groves Dictionary of American Music, Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, and The Harvard Biographical Dictionary of Music.

Active in the performance of new music, Mr. O’Brien co-founded the Cleveland professional new music ensemble Reconnaissance in 1978 and was associated with the group until 1984. In 1985-87 he served on the production board of the Contemporary Music Forum in Washington, D.C.

Mr. O’Brien studied composition with Robert Beadell, Bernd Alois Zimmermann, John Eaton, Iannis Xenakis and Donald Erb. He received undergraduate and graduate degrees from the University of Nebraska, undertook post-graduate studies as a Fulbright scholar at the Staatliche Hochschule für Musik in Köln, Germany, and received his doctorate from Case Western Reserve University / Cleveland Institute of Music. A member of the faculty at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music since 1987 where he was chair of the composition department from 1994 to 1999 and served as an associate dean from 1999 through 2016, Mr. O’Brien is presently Professor of Composition Emeritus. He previously served as composer-in-residence at the Cleveland Institute of Music and as chair of the composition / theory departments in the Benjamin Rome School of Music of the Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C.