Shulamit ran biography of albert

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2006 Women in Music Festival Home
2006 Press Release
2006 Schedule and Repertoire
2006 Composer Biographies

Ruby Aspinall

At age seventeen, composer and harpist Ruby Aspinall was honored with the first prize for the Young Composer’s Award of Wales. As a soloist and chamber musician, she has performed in numerous venues, including Buckingham Palace and the Royal Festival Hall. She is also a member of the Amadio Duo. Ms. Aspinall studied harp at the Trinity College of Music where she earned a Bachelor of Music degree.

Amy Beach  |  1867-1944

Composer and pianist Amy Beach wrote over 300 works in a variety of genres. Considered the foremost American female composer of her time, she was highly disciplined and known for her ability to create large-scale pieces rapidly. Primarily self-taught, Ms. Beach received critical acclaim not only in the United States, but also in Europe. Her compositional style has been described as both Romantic and post-Romantic.

Margaret Bonds  |  1913-1972

Composer, pianist, and teacher Margaret Bonds was the first African-American to appear with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, performing Florence Beatrice Price’s Piano Concerto. In addition, she received a Wanamaker Prize for her composition Sea Ghost. Bonds received degrees from Northwestern University and the Juilliard School. Her works are programmatic, and they are often infused with jazz harmonies, social ideas, and spiritual elements.

Lili Boulanger  |  1893-1918

French composer Lili Boulanger began musical studies at the age of three, and with the composer accompanying her, she sight-read Fauré songs a few years later. At nineteen, she caught the world’s attention by becoming the first woman to win the Prix de Rome (for her cantata Faust et Hélène). Although she was awarded a year of study in Rome, her stay was shortened due to poor health, and she died of tuberculosis at age twenty-five. In her short life, she compos

Shulamit Ran (Hebrew: שולמית רן‎; born October 21, 1949 in Tel Aviv, Israel) is an Israeli-American composer. She moved from Israel to New York at 14, as a scholarship student at the Mannes College of Music. Her Symphony (1990) won her the Pulitzer Prize. In this regard, she was the second woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in Music, the first being Ellen Taaffe Zwilich in 1983.

Shulamit Ran is a longtime faculty member of the University of Chicago and has served as composer-in-residence with both the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Chicago Lyric Opera. More recently she wrote a Violin Concerto (2003) for the Israeli violinist Ittai Shapira.

Ran studied with Ralph Shapey and dedicated her Symphony to him.

Many critics have commented on the combination of raw power and classical structure in Ran's work. Ran has written that she considers classical-era composer Ludwig van Beethoven her "compositional idol," and her work combines a taste for rigorous structural logic with a unique brand of "free atonality."

“Shulamit Ran has never forgotten that a vital essence of composition is communication.” So ran the review in the Chicago Tribune following the premiere of Legends by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. This sort of reaction is by no means unusual. Around the country, from Seattle to Baltimore to Houston, commentary on her music typically runs thus: “gloriously human”, and “compelling not only for its white-hot emotional content but for its intelligence and compositional clarity,” — “Ran is a magnificent composer.” It is hardly surprising, then, that Symphony, which has drawn references to “the superior quality of her musical imagination and artistic invention” and which has been hailed as “a work that will reward each new listening” should have won the 1991 Pulitzer Prize for Music. Ms. Ran’s work displays an emotional quality and technical superiority that has led critics to acclaim her work as “written with the same sense of humanity f

The works of Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Shulamit Ran display an emotional quality and technical superiority that has led critics to acclaim her music as “written with the same sense of humanity found in Mozart’s most profound opera arias or Mahler’s searching symphonies.” 

Ran began composing songs to Hebrew poetry at age 7 in her native Israel. By 9, she was studying composition and piano with some of Israel’s most noted musicians, including composers Alexander U. Boskovich and Paul Ben-Haim; within several years was having her early works performed by professional musicians as well as orchestras. She continued her piano and composition studies in the United States, on scholarships from the Mannes College of Music in New York and the America Israel Cultural Foundation, with Nadia Reisenberg and Norman Dello Joio, respectively. She later studied piano with Dorothy Taubman. Ran also lists her late colleague and friend Ralph Shapey, with whom she studied in 1977, as an important mentor.

Among her numerous awards, fellowships and commissions are those from the Martha Baird Rockefeller Fund, the Ford Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Fromm Music Foundation, WFMT-FM, Chamber Music America, the Serge Koussevitzky Music Foundation in the Library of Congress, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Eastman School of Music, the American Composers Orchestra (Concerto for Orchestra), the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center (Concerto da Camera II) and the Philadelphia Orchestra (Symphony 1989-90, first performed in 1990, Pulitzer Prize 1991, first place Kennedy Center Friedheim Award 1992).

Her other orchestral works include Legends, a joint commission celebrating the centennials of the Chicago Symphony and the University of Chicago, which premiered in 1993, and Vessels of Courage and Hope, commissioned by the Albert Shapiro Fund and premiered by the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra in 1998 to commem