Richard Grayson (composer)

Richard Grayson (March 25, 1941 – July 3, 2016) was an American composer and pianist.

Richard Grayson was born in New York on March 25, 1941 (Anon. 2016a; Anon. 2016b). He received his PhD in composition from UCLA in 1969—only the third person to receive a UCLA music Ph.D., after Michael Zearott and Edward Applebaum (Wager 1989)—and in the same year joined the music faculty of Occidental College, where he taught until his retirement in 2001. His 32 years of annual keyboard improvisation concerts, in which he improvised based on audience requests, were a highlight of that college's concert season (Tranquada 2016). He is also a composer of instrumental and vocal music as well as of live electronic music. His awards include a Fulbright Scholarship to study in 1965–66 with Henri Pousseur in Brussels and at the Cologne Courses for New Music (, 200), and a composition grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. From fall 2001 until June 2016 he taught music theory courses at the Crossroads School in Santa Monica (Anon. 2016b).

For over three decades Grayson has given concerts and seminars for the Yamaha Music Education Foundation and has visited Japan many times to perform and teach. For the past ten summers he has taught improvisation courses at the Showa Academy of Music in Kawasaki, Japan, and was also invited to give seminars and performances at conservatories in Taiwan, China, and Vietnam. He has been a featured performer at several US national piano pedagogy conferences and was twice invited to give master classes in improvisation at the Oficina de Música Festival in Curitiba, Brazil.

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