Discipline: Music Composition

Jane Brockman

Discipline: Music Composition
Region: Santa Monica, CA
MacDowell Fellowships: 1982, 1983, 1985
More: janebrockman.org
Jane Brockman is an American composer. Her concert music is influenced by her experience composing for dance and film, as well as the formal structure of academia. Raised in upstate New York, Brockman was the first woman to earn a doctorate in music composition in the 150-year history of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She also studied in Paris with Max Deutsch on a Fulbright/Alliance Française fellowship and in Vienna on a Rackham Prize fellowship. She has been awarded honors and fellowships from MacDowell, the State of Connecticut, Meet the Composer, and the Composers Conference (directed by Mario Davidovsky). Her first orchestra piece won the Sigvald Thompson Prize for orchestral composition. Brockman’s mentors include Pulitzer Prize winners Leslie Bassett and Ross Lee Finney, as well as George Balch Wilson, Wallace Berry, and Eugene Kurtz. Brockman taught music theory and composition at the University of Connecticut, Storrs, where she founded the University’s Computer Music Studio and produced electronic music concerts. She has also been on the faculties of the Hartt School of Music/the University of Hartford, the University of Rhode Island, and the University of Michigan. She was one of four composers selected nationally for a Sundance Institute Film Composers’ Lab fellowship, working with Henry Mancini, Bruce Broughton, Alan Silvestri, David Newman, and the Utah Symphony. Afterward, she left her tenured professorship at the University of Connecticut to freelance as a composer in the Los Angeles area, scoring films and television, as well as writing concert music. Today, in Los Angeles, her focus is entirely on concert music. Her music is recorded on the AIX, Leonarda, Opus One, Coronet, Drimala, Centaur, and Capstone labels, and published by Arsis Press and Diaphanous Music, which is distributed by Theodore Front Musical Literature Inc. Her music has been in the touring repertoires of Continuum and the New Music Consort in NYC, and virtuoso clarinetists F. Gerard Errante, William Powell, and Roslyn Dunlop (Australia). She has served on the Boards of Directors of New York’s Composers Concordance, as well as Women in Film, and the Society of Composers and Lyricists in Los Angeles. She also served for three years on review panels for the National Endowment for the arts, Washington, D.C. and produced concerts with the LoCal Composers Ensemble. She is the director/CEO of Music & Conversations, Inc.

Studios

Veltin

Jane Brockman worked in the Veltin studio.

Veltin Studio was donated by alumni of the Veltin School, a school for girls in New York with a highly respected visual arts department. As the plaque just outside the entrance attests, this studio was used by poet Edwin Arlington Robinson during most of the 24 summers he spent at MacDowell. Perhaps most famously, Thornton Wilder put the finishing…

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