Discipline: Music Composition

Richard Becker

Discipline: Music Composition
Region: Richmond, VA
MacDowell Fellowships: 1990
Richard Becker is an American composer, pianist and chamber musician who has performed in venues across America and Europe, such as New York’s Alice Tully Hall, Carnegie Hall, Washington, DC’s Library of Congress, the National Gallery of Art, the French Embassy, École Normale de Musique, and the Cité Internationale des Arts. Becker received degrees in piano performance and composition from the Eastman School of Music, and Boston University under the direction of Leonard Shure, Tobias Matthay, and Cecile Staub Genhart. Later he taught at the University of Texas and Boston University. Becker’s music has been broadcast on NPR, the Voice of America, WNYC, WETA, WGMS, and WCVE, and has been the recipient of a Marshall University Artist Residency, featured at the National Conferences of the Music Teachers National Association, the CMS Mid-Atlantic, the Brattleboro Chamber Festival, the American Music Festival of the National Gallery, the James Madison University Contemporary Music and the Roxbury Music festivals in New York. Becker has also received several grants, including a Meet the Composer grant, and a Contemporary Music Studio grant, and his compositions have been recorded on CRS and Albany records. Becker currently serves as the coordinator of piano studies at the University of Richmond in Virginia.

Studios

Irving Fine

Richard Becker worked in the Irving Fine studio.

Youngstown Studio was given to MacDowell by friends of Miss Myra McKeown in Youngstown, OH, where she promoted both art and music. It was renamed Irving Fine Studio in 1972 in honor of Irving Fine, a distinguished composer, conductor, and teacher who was a MacDowell Fellow during the 1940s and 1950s. The simple interior of the studio…

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