(This composer has multiple commissions - click here to view all)

Title: 
Commission: 2019
Completed: 
Instrumentation: 
Premiere Location: 
Premiere Ensemble: 
Notes:

Title: Language Instruction
Commission: 2001
Completed: 2003
Instrumentation: clarinet, violin, cello, piano
Premiere Location: Merkin Concert Hall, NYC
Premiere Ensemble: Contrasts Quartet
Notes:

Composer and clarinetist Derek Bermel has been internationally recognized for his creativity, theatricality, and virtuosity. Bermel is acclaimed for music that is “intricate, witty, clear-spoken, tender, and extraordinarily beautiful [and] covers an amazing amount of ground, from the West African rhythms of Dust Dances to the Bulgarian folk strains of Thracian Echoes, to the shimmering harmonic splendor of Elixir. In the hands of a composer less assured, all that globe-trotting would seem like affectation; Bermel makes it an artistic imperative” (Joshua Kosman, San Francisco Chronicle). Bermel and his works have received the Alpert Award in the Arts, Rome Prize, Guggenheim and Fulbright Fellowships, the Trailblazer Award from the American Music Center, and the Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Recordings of Bermel’s “unambiguously luscious” music (New York Times), with the composer as clarinet soloist, have received two Grammy nominations: Migrations (Naxos, 2020) and Voices (BMOP, 2010). His Migration Series for jazz band and orchestra was acclaimed by Gramophone Magazine as “exciting, compelling attention from the very first bars . . . . Bermel succeeds with Bernsteinian élan.” Bermel’s newly recorded orchestral work A Shout, a Whisper, and a Trace, noted for its “ideal balance of tenderness and raucousness, of stillness and intricate rhythms” (Los Angeles Times), was cited as best of the year by the New York Times critic Anthony Tommasini for its “dizzying melting pot of folklike rhythms, droning tunes and pungent modernist harmonies, spiked with bursts of wailing jazz.”

Bermel’s studies of ethnomusicology and orchestration with Andre Hajdu in Jerusalem heralded his immersion in music of the world—traveling later to Bulgaria to study the Thracian folk style; to Dublin, to study uilleann pipes; to Ghana, to study the Lobi xylophone; and to Brazil, to learn caxixi—adding the study of Dutch, Portuguese, French and Italian along the way. Inevitably, his engagement with other musical cultures has become part of the fabric and force of his compositional language, in which the human voice and its myriad inflections play a leading role.