Shulamit Ran, composer
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 "a work that will reward each new listening" should have won the 1991 Pulitzer Prize for Music.
Shulamit Ran, born in Tel Aviv, Israel, where she received her early training, came to the U.S. at the age of fourteen to study, having received scholarships from The Mannes College of Music in New York and the America Israel Cultural Foundation. Her composition teachers in Israel and in the U.S. have included A.U. Boskovich, Paul Ben-Haim, Norman Dello Joio and Ralph Shapey. Her principal piano teachers were Nadia Reisenberg and Dorothy Taubman.
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, Chamber Music America, Eastman School of Music, the American Composers Orchestra (Concerto for Orchestra), the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center (Concerto da Camera II), the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the Philadelphia Orchestra (Symphony, first performed in 1990, Pulitzer Prize 1991, first place Kennedy Center Friedheim Award, 1992), the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (Legends), the Baltimore Symphony (Vessels of Courage and Hope), the Koussevitzky Music Foundation, and many more. Her first opera, Between Two Worlds (The Dybbuk) , which received its much-acclaimed premiere in June, 1997, was commissioned by the Lyric Opera of Chicago, and was described in Opera News as "the most powerful new music-theater piece to emerge from Lyric’s composer-in-residence program." The European premiere of Between Two Worlds took place in May, 1999, at the Bielefeld Opera, in a German translation.
Ms. Ran’s Hyperbolae for piano won the competition for a set piece for all participants in the Second Artur Rubinstein International Piano Competition in Israel in 1977. Her East Wind for solo flute was commissioned by the National Flute Association for its 1988 Young Artists Competition. The same organization later commissioned Voices, her flute concerto, for it's year 2000 convention. Her current projects include works for the Brentano String Quartet, the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players (a Koussevitzky Foundation commission), a concerto for violinist Ittai Shapiro and British conductor Charles Hazlewood, and a work for Chorus and Orchestra for the American Composers Orchestra. We can look forward to future compositions from this highly respected composer to have the same emotional quality and technical superiority that has led critics to acclaim her work as "written with the same sense of humanity found in Mozart’s most profound opera arias or Mahler's searching symphonies."
In 1990, Ms. Ran was appointed by Maestro Daniel Barenboim to be Composer-in-Residence with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra as part of the Meet the Composer Orchestra Residencies Program, a position she held for seven seasons. From 1994 to 1997, Ran also served as the fifth Brena and Lee Freeman Sr. Composer-in-Residence with the Lyric Opera of Chicago.
Shulamit Ran, who had performed extensively as a pianist in the U.S., Europe, Israel and elsewhere, is presently the William H. Colvin Professor in the Department of Music at the University of Chicago, where she has taught since 1973. In 1987 she was Visiting Professor at Princeton University. She is the recipient of honorary doctorates from Mount Holyoke College (1988), Spertus Institute (1994), Beloit College (1996), and the New School of Social Research in New York (1997), and was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1992. Her works are published by the Theodore Presser Company and by the Israeli Music Institute. Recordings are available on Angel, Bridge, CRI, Erato, Gasparo, JMC (Jerusalem Music Center), Koch International Classics and Vox labels, including several all-Ran discs, with recording projects with Teldec (Chicago Symphony Orchestra) and New World Records (Peabody Trio) still ahead.
