Derek Bermel’s musical passions can best be described as omnivorous. He is active as a composer of concert music, as a classical clarinetist, conductor, jazz and rock keyboard player and vocalist, and music director of TONK, a Dutch-American ensemble whos performances meld poetry, music, visual arts, and dance. He has been awarded many of today’s most important prizes, including a Guggenheim award, a Fulbright Fellowship, and residencies at Tanglewood, Banff, Yaddo, and the Lincoln Center Directors Lab.
A recipient of the Rome Prize for the 01-02 year, Bermel is currently in residence at the American Academy in Rome. In the 2002-03 season, recently commissioned works will be premiered by the National Symphony, the Westchester Philharmonic (NY), the New Jersey Symphony, and the Pacific Symphony. His Narrated fable The Sting was premiered by the St. Louis Symphony on March 17. Also in that month he was “Music Alive” composer-in-residence with the Albany Symphony, where he performed his clarinet concerto Voices with the symphony. July saw the release of the CD Soul Garden on CRI (CD 895), containing eight solo and chamber works by Bermel. The recording features Paul Neubauer, viola, Fred Sherry, cello, and the Borromeo String Quartet performing the title track (a work commissioned by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center), and pianist Christopher Taylor in Turning, a work he has championed. In October Bermel performs Voices with the BBC Symphony and with the Los Angeles Philharmonic conducted by John Adams.
Trained at Yale University and the University of Michigan, Bermel studied composition with William Albright, Louis Andriessen, William Bolcom, and Michael Tenzer; ethnomusicology and orchestration in Jerusalem with Andre Hajdu; and Lobi xylophone in Ghana with Ngmen Baaru. Among other awards he has received a Javits Fellowship, the Harvey Gaul Prize, the Quinto Maganini Award, a New York Foundation for the Arts Creative Artists Fellowship, the Brian Israel Prize, several ASCAP awards, and residencies at Bowdoin, and Tanglewood, and the International Workshop for Choreographers and Composers (U.K.).
Bermel has received commissions from the Faber Music Millennium Series, the American Composers Orchestra, the Albany Symphony, De Ereprijs (Netherlands), the Birmingham Royal Ballet (U.K.), the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble, the Stony Brook Contemporary Chamber Players, the New York International Fringe Festival, TONK, Jazz Xchange (U.K.), pianist Christopher Taylor, organist William Albright, baritone Timothy Jones, cellist Fred Sherry, and the New York Youth Symphony.
His music has been featured at festivals including De Suite Muziekweek (Amsterdam), Composers Inc. (San Francisco), Imagine (Memphis), Cactus Pear (San Antonio), Gaudeamus Muziekweek (Amsterdam), Society of Composers, Inc. National Conference (Iowa), American Guild of Organists (Washington, Los Angeles), Society for New Music (NY), Bowling Green (Ohio), Focus! (NY), Interlochen (Michigan), Thunderclaps (Den Haag), Tanglewood, and Banff (Alberta).
As a clarinetist, Bermel has been hailed by the New York Times as “brilliant” and his talent as “truly exceptional.” He has premiered dozens of new works for clarinet in appearances as soloist throughout the U.S. and Europe, including recitals in New York, Amsterdam, Los Angeles, Detroit, Jerusalem, The Hague, and Paris and in radio broadcasts on BBC (London), NCRV (Amsterdam), and WQXR (New York). He recently performed William Bolcom’s Concerto for Clarinet with the Lexington (KY) Philharmonic and the Greensboro (NC) Symphony.
In May 1998 he premiered his clarinet concerto Voices with the American Composers Orchestra in Carnegie Hall, and subsequently with the Boston Modern Orchestra Project at the American Symphony Orchestra League National Conference in 2000, and with the Albany Symphony in the spring of 2002. Bermel is founding clarinetist of Music from The Copland House, the resident ensemble of Copland’s longtime home, now a creative center for American music.
In 1999, Bermel was awarded one of three Ford Foundation Conducting Awards, leading the Cleveland Chamber Symphony in his Continental Divide and Edward Miller’s Cascades. He recently led the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble in a program including two of his own works (as well as pieces by Revueltas, Lisa Bielawa, and Claude Vivier), and conducted his orchestral work, Dust Dances, at Interlochen Academy. He toured with the British dance company Jazz Xchange, conducting and performing in his composition Messengers, a collaboration with choreographer Sheron Wray; he also conducted his score for two Brecht plays, Caucasian Chalk Circle and Drums in the Night at the International Fringe Festival in New York.