Michael Riesman

Michael Riesman
Genres	Electronic
Occupation(s)	composer, conductor, keyboardist, and record producer
Associated acts	Philip Glass
Website	Official site

Michael Riesman is a composer, conductor, keyboardist, and record producer, best known as Music Director of the Philip Glass Ensemble and conductor of nearly all of Glass' film scores.

Michael Riesman studied composition with Peter Stearns and conducting with Carl Bamberger at the Mannes College of Music and got a B.S. there in 1967. The summer of 1967 he went to the Aspen Music Festival where he studied with Darius Milhaud, and won the student composition prize. He then went on to study composition with Leon Kirchner, Roger Sessions, and Earl Kim at Harvard, where he earned an M.A. and PhD (1972). He was a composer in residence at the Marlboro Music Festival in 1969 and a fellow at Tanglewood in 1970. He was awarded a Fulbright fellowship in 1970 and studied with Gottfried von Einem in Vienna. He moved to New York City in the summer of 1971 and then taught at SUNY-Purchase that winter, leaving in the summer of 1972 to dedicate himself full-time to a performing career.

He had some early successes as a composer, most notably with "Phases", a work for electronically modulated piano, given a premiere in at the Metropolitan Museum in New York by Peter Serkin. The New York Times called the piece "the most interesting work on the program" which consisted of works by major 20th-century figures including Luciano Berio and Olivier Messiaen. Riesman later performed the piece himself at the New York Philharmonic's downtown series at the Public Theater. Another important work was his "Chamber Concerto" which he conducted in a performance with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra at Carnegie Hall and elsewhere.

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