Marti Epstein


Marti Epstein is an American composer. She is Professor of Composition at Berklee College of Music and the Boston Conservatory at Berklee.

Education

She began composition studies in 1977 while still in high school with Professor Robert Beadell at the University of Nebraska. She earned degrees from the University of Colorado and Boston University. Her principal composition instructors were Charles Eakin, Joyce Mekeel, and Bernard Rands.

Career

Dr. Epstein has received numerous awards and commissions. In April 2020, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for music composition. She was a fellow at the MacDowell Colony and twice a fellow in composition at the Tanglewood Music Center, where she worked with Oliver Knussen and Hans Werner Henze. Composition prizes include a Massachusetts Cultural Council Grant, Fromm Foundation Commission, Lee Ettleson Composition Prize Bay Area Women's Philharmonic Composition Prize, and Friends and Enemies of New Music Composition She has received commissions from ALEA III, Sequitur New Music Ensemble, the Fromm Foundation, guitarist David Tanenbaum, the American Dance Festival the CORE Ensemble, the A*DEvantgarde Festival of Munich, tubist Samuel Pilafian, flutist Marianne Gedigian, the New England Brass Quintet, the Iowa Brass Quintet, Boston Conservatory, Boston University Marsh Chapel Choir, pianist Kathleen Supove, the Massachusetts Music Teachers Association, the Foxborough Musical Association, pianist Paul Carlson, the CrossSound New Music Festival of Juneau Alaska the Seattle Trumpet Consort and the Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra of Boston.
Her music has been performed in Europe and America by ensembles such as the San Francisco Symphony, the Radio Symphony Orchestra of Frankfurt, the Atlantic Brass Quintet, and Ensemble Modern. In 1992 she was invited by the City of Munich to compose her puppet opera, Hero und Leander, for the 1992 Munich Biennale for New Music Theater.
Dr Epstein's work for piano,Waterbowls, has been described as "a luminous study in quiet sonorities and the ache of memory". Writing for The Boston Globe, David Weininger writes Epsteins's music "has the feel of suspension in space, fragile and almost static..." The International Trumpet Guild Journal comments on her exploration of color in the Two Canons for Seven Natural Trumpets.

Discography

Orchestral