Richard Festinger emerged into prominence as a composer in the early 1980s. At that time he was the founding director of the nationally acclaimed Earplay ensemble for contemporary American music, based in San Francisco. His music has been performed throughout the United States, and in Europe and Asia. His works have been composed for innumerable ensembles, including Parnassus, Earplay, the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, the New York New Music Ensemble, the Alexander String Quartet, the City Winds, the Laurel Trio, the Left Coast Ensemble, the Alter Ego Ensemble, Network for New Music, the Miroglio-Aprudo Duo, the Washington Square Contemporary Music Society, the New Millennium Ensemble, the Redwood Symphony Orchestra, and the San Francisco Chamber Orchestra. His music has also been performed by Griffin, Speculum Musicae, Phantom Arts, Composers Inc., the Empyrean Ensemble, the Sun String Quartet, the Alexander String Quartet, the Berkeley and Riverside Symphonies, sopranos Jane Manning, Karol Bennett and Patricia Green, Music Etcetera Chamber Arts Collective, the Orchestra da Camera Italiana G.F. Ghedini, the Ensemble Italiano per la Musica Contemporanea, Ensemble Anti-Dogma, the Seoul, Korea Festival of Electro-Acoustic Music, and the Boston Chamber Ensemble.
Mr. Festinger’s works have been commissioned by the Jerome Foundation, the Fromm Foundation at Harvard University, the Koussevitzky Foundation in the Library of Congress, the Barlow Foundation, the Pew Charitable Trust, the Mary Flagler Cary Trust, the Music Teachers National Association, the Hoff-Bartelson School, Volti, the Ringling School of Design, and the American Composers Forum. He has received recording awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Aaron Copland Fund, the Alice M. Ditson Fund, and the Argosy Foundation. He has been a resident artist at the Camargo Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, Cité Internationale des Arts, Yaddo, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Bogliasco Ligurian Study Center, the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Study Center, the Couvent des Récollets, the Aaron Copland House, the Oberpfälzer Künstlerhaus, and the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing. He has been a composer in residence at the Festival of New American Music in Sacramento, and a composition fellow at the Wellesley Composers Conference, the June in Buffalo Festival, and the Akadémie d’été at IRCAM in Paris. He has been honored by both the Walter Hinrichsen Award and an Academy Recording Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Mr. Festinger studied composition at the University of California in Berkeley with Andrew Imbrie. Before turning to composing, he led his own groups as a jazz performer. He has taught at the University of California in Berkeley and Davis, and at Dartmouth College, and since 1990 he has been a professor of music at San Francisco State University. His music is published by C.F. Peters, and is soon also to be published by Editions Henri Lemoine in Paris. His works have been recorded for the Bridge, Centaur, CRI and CRS labels. A new CD of his works performed by the New York New Music Ensemble will be released in 2009 on the Naxos label.
Education
- M.A., Ph.D. (Composition), University of California at Berkeley
- B.M. (magna cum laude), San Francisco State University
