David Evan Thomas

The music of David Evan Thomas has been praised for its eloquence, power and craft. Critics have noted Thomas’s loving ties to tradition, expressed in clear forms, smart instrumental writing and skillful orchestration. Audiences have responded to the music’s warmth, lyricism and sense of play.

Thomas is the recipient of awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the McKnight Foundation and the American Guild of Organists. He has received commissions from the Minnesota Orchestra, the Jerome Foundation, The Schubert Club and the American Composers Forum.

In a varied catalogue that includes music for orchestra and wind ensemble, two dozen chamber works, keyboard pieces large and small, and an opera, vocal music is particularly prominent, with twelve song cycles—on subjects ranging from medieval women troubadours to the baseball writings of Donald Hall—and over forty choral works. Thomas’s music is published by ECS Publishing, Augsburg Fortress, Falls House, Fatrock Ink, Jeanné, MorningStar, and Yelton-Rhodes. His music been performed by the Minnesota Orchestra, London’s Westminster Cathedral Choir, the trio of Gil Shaham, Truls Mørk and Yefim Bronfman, The Rose Ensemble, and the Minneapolis and Rosalyra String Quartets. From 1997-2005 he was composer-in-residence for The Schubert Club; he has also served in that capacity with Westminster Presbyterian Church, Minneapolis and the Cathedral of Saint Paul.

Born in Rochester, New York in 1958, David Evan Thomas received his early musical training in the Preparatory Department of the Eastman School of Music, and he received degrees from Northwestern University, Eastman and the University of Minnesota. His teachers have included Dominick Argento, Samuel Adler and Alan Stout. He received further training at the Aspen Festival and as an Associate of David Diamond at the Atlantic Center for the Arts.

Thomas lives in Minneapolis, where in addition to writing music, he is active as a pianist, conductor, lecturer and program annotator.
For more information...

Randall Thompson

Randall Thompson (born in New York City on April 21, 1899; died in Boston on July 9, 1984), eminent American composer, was educated at Harvard University (B.A. 1920; M.A. 1922). His teachers there included Walter R. Spalding, Edward B. Hill, and Archibald T. Davison. He also studied with Ernest Bloch. From 1922 to 1925, Thompson held a fellowship at the American Academy in Rome, and he twice won a Guggenheim Fellowship (1929, 1930). From 1927–1929 and again in 1936–1937, he was assistant professor of music at Wellesley College. Other academic positions included professorships at the University of California, Berkeley (1937–1939) and Princeton University (1946–1948).

From 1939 to 1941, Thompson was director of the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia and then became head of the music division of the School of Fine Arts of the University of Virginia (1941–1946). In 1945 he was appointed Walter Bigelow Rosen Professor of Music at Harvard University and became Professor Emeritus at the close of the 1964–65 year. Thompson received numerous awards and honorary doctoral degrees from American colleges and universities including Yale, Harvard, and the New England Conservatory of Music. In 1959, the Italian Government named Randall Thompson Cavaliere ufficiale al merito della Reppubllca Italtana. He was a member of The National Institute of Arts and Letters and of The American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Commissioned in 1958 for the two-hundredth anniversary of the incorporation of the Town of Amherst, Massachusetts, Frostiana was composed between June 15 and July 7, 1959 in Gstaad, Switzerland. The work was first performed as part of the Bicentennial Commemoration at an inter-faith convocation in the Amherst Regional High School Auditorium on October 18, 1959. It was sung by the Bicentennial Chorus, comprised of singers of all denominations in the township. Professor J. Heywood Alexander accompanied, the composer conducted, and the poet was present.
For more information...