Phillip Ramey

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Phillip Ramey (b. Elmhurst, Illinois, United States, September 12, 1939) is an American composer, pianist, and writer on music.

He studied composition with the Russian-born composer Alexander Tcherepnin from 1959 to 1962, first at the International Academy of Music in Nice, France, then at DePaul University in Chicago. He later studied composition with Jack Beeson at Columbia University (1962-65)

For many years, he was a friend of the composer Paul Bowles, and visited him in his home in Tangier, Morocco on a number of occasions. He had professional associations with Aaron Copland, Samuel Barber, Leonard Bernstein, Virgil Thomson, and Vladimir Horowitz.

He is the composer of orchestral works including three piano concertos, chamber music, and many works for solo piano, among them five sonatas. In 1993 he was commissioned to compose his Concerto for Horn and Strings for Philip Myers and the New York Philharmonic, in celebration of that orchestra's 150th anniversary.[1]

Ramey is the author of several hundred liner notes and interviews with American composers, and served from 1977 to 1993 as the annotator and program editor for the New York Philharmonic. He is also the author of Irving Fine: An American Composer in His Time, which received the 2006 ASCAP Deems Taylor/Nicolas Slonimsky Award for Outstanding Musical Biography.

1 Compositions
2 Recordings
3 Books
4 External links

[edit] Compositions

1968 - Commentaries, for flute and piano
1972 - Leningrad Rag, for piano
1984 - Idyll, for flute and piano

[edit] Recordings

1975 - Carlos, Wendy. Wendy Carlos, By Request. LP. Columbia. Re-released on enhanced CD in 2003 by East Side Digital (Minneapolis, Minnesota). Performed by Wendy Carlos, synthesizer; with Phillip Ramey, piano (4th and 5th works: Dialogues for piano and two loudspeakers and Episodes for piano).
2006 - Piano Music, 1961-2003. Stephen Gosling, piano. CD. Toccata Classics.

[edit] Books

Ramey, Phillip (2005). Irving Fine: An American Composer in His Time. Lives in Music series, no. 8. Hillsdale, New York: Pendragon Press, in association with Library of Congress.