Arthur Gottschalk’s music has been described as “rapturous, argumentative, and prickly” (Gramophone Magazine), and “fascinatingly strange” (BBC Music Magazine). He is professor of music at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music, and is a recipient of the Charles Ives Prize of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, annual ASCAP Awards since 1980, and has been a composer-in-residence at the famed Columbia/Princeton Electronic Music Center, the Piccolo Spoleto Festival, and a visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome. He has been a featured composer for the Thailand International Composition Festival and the China-ASEAN Music Festival, won First Prize in the Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra Competition for Upon Whose Shoulders We Stand, held both a Bogliasco and a MacDowell Fellowship, and received the First Prize in the Concorso Internazionale di Composizione Originale, Corciano, for his Concerto for Violin and Symphonic Winds. He likes to explore the interstices between popular and art music, and between the sacred and profane.
While in residence at MacDowell, Gottschalk completed a commission for the Siberian State Orchestra and Choir, called Tebe Boga with text in Old Slavonic. Because of tensions that occurred since his residency between Russia and the U.S., the Russian premiere has yet to occur. It premiered in the U.S. on February 16, 2020, at Stern Auditorium in Carnegie Hall, with Timothy Jones as the bass baritone soloist.
