composer

Primarily a composer of concert and theatrical chamber music, Martin Brody has also written extensively for film and television. He has received various awards and commissions, among them the Academy-Institute Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, three fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Pinanski Prize for excellence in teaching at Wellesley College, and commissions from the Fromm Foundation at Harvard, the MacArthur Foundation's Regional Touring Program, the Artists Foundation, and the Massachusetts Arts and Humanities Council. In the fall of 2001, he was Fromm Composer-in-Residence at the American Academy in Rome. He also served as Heiskell Arts Director there from 2007-2010. Brody is president of the Stefan Wolpe Society and has also served as a Director of the League of Composers-ISCM, the Composers Conference, Boston Musica Viva, and WGBH Radio's Art of the States. In 1987 he collaborated with the ethnomusicologist Ted Levin to initiate a US-USSR composers exchange sponsored by the International Research and Exchanges Board, the first such exchange to occur in 25 years. He has written extensively on contemporary music and serves on the editorial board of Perspectives of New Music. He is Catherine Mills Davis Professor of Music at Wellesley College, where he has been on the faculty since 1979.

Performances

Distler Performance Hall at Tufts University | January 30, 2011
Houghton Chapel at Wellesley College | January 29, 2011
Studzinski Recital Hall at Bowdoin College | January 28, 2011

News and Press

[Concert Review] Professor Brody's "monsters" scare some but inspire many

Were music a liquid, the music performed in the “Monsters of Modernism” concert would be a steaming mug of black coffee. And don’t even think of asking for milk and sugar. Boston Modern Orchestra Project’s Jan. 29 concert, led by conductor Gil Rose, turned heads with its unconventional music. The composers were “uncompromising,” Rose said. “They wrote the music that they believed in,” regardless of what the popular norms were. Among the contemporary composers featured was Wellesley Music Professor Martin Brody.

The Wellesley News Full review
[Concert Review] Not at all Monsters of Modernism

Gil Rose, who has included Tufts University as one of the bases of his Boston Modern Orchestra Project, brought a group of nineteen of Boston’s best freelancers to Distler Hall on Sunday afternoon, January 30, for a program of vivid (and not at all monstrous) American works for small orchestra and chamber groups. BMOP gave the same program at Bowdoin College and Wellesley College before this well-seasoned wrap-up. The audience was smaller than it ought to have been, but the weather was certainly much to blame for that.

The Boston Musical Intelligencer Full review
[Interview] Martin Brody: a new "Monster" of Modernism

Wellesley College music faculty member Martin Brody will premiere his anticipated new work, “Touching Bottom,” in tonight’s concert entitled “Monsters of Modernism.” The evening’s event commences a semester of performances from Wellesley College faculty and students in collaboration with the Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP), which is in residence at the college for the 2010-2011 academic year.

Wellesley Patch Full review
[News Coverage] BMOP ensemble to premiere contemporary compositions

Tonight, the Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP) will be performing its second program of a three-part series at the College.

BMOP, directed by Gil Rose, plays a diverse repertoire of contemporary music. This particular program, entitled “Monsters of Modernism” is comprised of pieces from the latter half of the 20th century.

“When we think about concert music, we have this image of powdered wigs and classical composers [such as] Beethoven and Mozart,” said Associate Professor of Music Vineet Shende. “This program offers a completely different side to that common notion.”

The Bowdoin Orient Full review
[News Coverage] Bottom's up in 'Midsummer' musical revamp

Martin Brody writes music, he says, in the decidedly modern idiomatic zone of composers like Igor Stravinsky, Olivier Messiaen, and Elliott Carter. But, though he doesn’t know exactly why, Brody, a music theory and composition professor at Wellesley College since 1979, has always had a fondness for Felix Mendelssohn.

The Chronicle of Higher Education Full review