Discipline: Music Composition

Thomas Whitman

Discipline: Music Composition
Region: Philadelphia, PA
MacDowell Fellowships: 1990
More: www.twhitman.com
Thomas Whitman began his musical studies with cellist Harry Wimmer. He studied composition with George Crumb, Gerald Levinson, Max Lifchitz, and Richard Wernick, among others. A Luce Scholar in 1986-87, he studied in Bali with the late I Madé Gerindem. Other prizes and honors include an ASCAP Foundation Grant; artist residencies at MacDowell and Yaddo; and commissions from many ensembles, including Orchestra 2001, Network for New Music, North/South Consonance, and the Philadelphia Singers. Whitman’s compositions include chamber music, dance and film scores, and five operas. On the faculty of Swarthmore College since 1990, he is the founder and co-director of Gamelan Semara Santi, the Philadelphia area’s only Indonesian percussion orchestra. He also directs the Chester Children’s Gamelan project, a volunteer effort that introduces Indonesian performing arts to schoolchildren in Chester, PA. Selected recordings are available on Avie, North/South, and Albany Records. Sheet music is available through Cassiopeia Publishing.

Studios

Veltin

Thomas Whitman 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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