Biography

Chester Biscardi’s music has been performed throughout Asia, Europe, and North and South America. His catalog includes At the Still Point, for orchestra, Piano Concerto, Sailors & Dreamers, for voice and chamber ensemble, the opera Tight-Rope, Trasumanar, for twelve percussionists and piano, and works for piano, voice, chorus, and chamber ensembles, as well as incidental music for theatre, dance, and television. His work is published by C. F. Peters, Theodore Presser Company, and Biscardi Music Press. Recordings appear on the Albany, Bridge, CRI (New World Records), New Albion, and Steinway & Sons labels, among others, including a Naxos American Classics release entitled Chester Biscardi: In Time’s Unfolding. He is a recipient of the Rome Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Academy Award in Music from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and a commission from the Koussevitzky Music Foundation in the Library of Congress, among numerous other awards and fellowships.

Born in Kenosha, Wisconsin in 1948, Biscardi studied English literature, Italian literature, and music composition at the University of Wisconsin-Madison before receiving a Doctor of Musical Arts degree from the Yale School of Music. His principal composition teachers included Kryzsztof Penderecki, Toru Takemitsu, Les Thimmig, and Yehudi Wyner. He is Faculty Emeritus at Sarah Lawrence College where he taught from 1977-2020. He was Director of the Music Program from 1987-2017 and the first recipient of the William Schuman Chair in Music.

Since the 1970s, Biscardi has been interested in the ways language and literature influence musical idea and form. Often a single word or poetic phrase generates the central idea of a composition, although his works are seldom overtly programmatic. The Italian tenzone [dialogue] inspired Tenzone, for two flutes and piano (1975), while T.S. Eliot’s ‘Burnt Norton,’ with its interplay of form and time, evoked At the Still Point (1977). Timbral and spatial concerns also play an important role in his early works. Transparent textures, delicate nuances, sounds frozen in time and space, and the cyclical nature of existence resonate from his study of Japanese music. In the 1985 opera, Tight-Rope, and the song cycle, The Gift of Life (1990–93), Biscardi’s lyrical impulses, pervasive in his later works, are more pronounced. Resisting Stillness (1996), an intimate, strikingly spare work for two guitars, has autobiographical aspects, which are also a characteristic element of his mature music. His Piano Quintet (2004), written in memory of his father, uses elements from ‘The Odyssey’ and several of his own earlier works, all of which, in the composer’s words, “explore the passage of time, loss, recovery, and transcendence.”

Career Summary
Chester Biscardi’s music has been performed throughout Asia, Europe, and North and South America. It has been featured at the Beijing Modern Music Festival, the Gaudeamus Festival in Rotterdam, the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival in England, Moscow Autumn, Music Today-Japan in Tokyo, the Thailand Composition Festival in Bangkok, the Lincoln Center Out-of-Doors Festival, the North American New Music Festival in Buffalo, the Festival of New American Music in Sacramento, New Music On The Point in Vermont, Piccolo Spoleto, the Staunton Music Festival, the International Guitar Festival of Morelia, and the Bienal of São Paulo, Brazil. Performances of his music have also been sponsored by the American Composers Orchestra, the BBC-London, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, the Cygnus Ensemble, Ensemble TIMF of Korea, the Gothia Percussion Ensemble of Sweden, the Group for Contemporary Music, the Houston Symphony, the Library of Congress, the National Flute Association, the New Jersey Percussion Ensemble, the Orchestra Sinfonica di Roma della RAI, the Orchestra of St. Luke’s Chamber Ensemble, Sequitur, and UNESCO/International Music Council.

Biscardi’s catalog includes At the Still Point, for orchestra, Piano Concerto, Recognition, for piano and violin with string orchestra, Sailors & Dreamers, for voice and chamber ensemble, Tight-Rope, a chamber opera in nine uninterrupted scenes, Trasumanar, for twelve percussionists and piano, and numerous works for piano, voice, chorus, and chamber ensembles, as well as incidental music for theater, dance, and television. His work is published by C. F. Peters Company/Edition Peters, Merion Music, Inc. of Theodore Presser Company, and Biscardi Music Press, and is distributed by Classical Vocal Reprints and Theodore Front Musical Literature, Inc. Recordings appear on the Albany, American Modern Recordings, Bridge, CRI (New World Records), Furious Artisans, Grand Piano, Intim Musik (Sweden), Naxos, New Albion, New Ariel, North/South Recordings, Perfect Enemy Records, Sept Jardins (Canada), and Steinway & Sons labels, including a Naxos American Classics release entitled Chester Biscardi: In Time’s Unfolding.

Biscardi is a recipient of the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Academy Award in Music and a Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the Aaron Copland Award, fellowships from the Bogliasco Foundation, the Djerassi Foundation, the Japan Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, and the Rockefeller Foundation (Bellagio), as well as grants from the Fromm Music Foundation at Harvard, the Koussevitzky Music Foundation in the Library of Congress, the Martha Baird Rockefeller Foundation, Meet the Composer, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts.

Born in 1948 in Kenosha, Wisconsin, he received a B.A. in English Literature, an M.A. in Italian Literature, and an M.M. in Musical Composition from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and an M.M.A. and a Doctor of Musical Arts degree from Yale. He is Faculty Emeritus at Sarah Lawrence College where he taught from 1977-2020. He was Director of the Music Program from 1987-2017 and the first recipient of the William Schuman Chair in Music.

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Music, Literature, and the Creative Process:
An Interview with Composer Chester Biscardi

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