Martin Bresnick

Martin Bresnick (born 1946) is a composer of contemporary classical music, film scores and experimental music.

Bresnick was born and raised in the Bronx, and is a graduate of New York City's specialized High School of Music and Art. He was educated at the University of Hartford (B.A. '67), Stanford University (M.A. '68, D.M.A. '72), and the Akademie für Musik, Vienna ('69-'70), and studied composition with John Chowning, Gyorgy Ligeti and Gottfried von Einem. He went on to teach at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, Stanford University and the Yale School of Music.

As a professor at Yale, he has been a widely influential teacher of contemporary composition. In 2006, he was elected to the membership of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, an organization that bestowed their first Charles Ives Living Award on him in 1998. Bresnick's work has also earned him many prizes over the years, including a Fulbright Fellowship, the Rome Prize, two National Endowment of the Arts grants and an Ancona Prize for his 1979 composition "Conspiracies".

His compositions tend to be concise and direct in expression. Most of them are chamber music compositions, including three string quartets (1968, 1984, 1992), a piano trio (1988), *** for clarinet, viola and piano (1997), and music for diverse ensembles. Many of his works, ranging from solo piano to chamber and orchestral settings, were composed as a cycle called Opere della Musica Povera, or Works of a Poor Music.

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