Derek Bermel

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Derek Bermel (b. New York 1967) is an American composer, clarinetist and conductor whose music incorporates various facets of world music, funk and jazz into traditionally classical performing forces and ensembles. He is the recipient of various awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship and the prestigious Rome Prize awarded to American artists for a year-long residency in Rome, Italy (Note: This award is given by the American Academy in Rome and has nothing to do with the Prix de Rome awarded by the Paris Conservatorie to its student composers.)

Bermel was educated at Yale University and later studied at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor with William Bolcom and William Albright. He also studied with Louis Andriessen in Amsterdam and Henri Dutilleux at Tanglewood.

He first came into national spotlight with works like Natural Selection for baritone and ensemble and Voices, a concerto for clarinet and orchestra which he wrote for himself to perform. The piece was premiered by the American Composers Orchestra under the baton of the composer/conductor Tan Dun and was later performed by many other ensembles and conductors including the Los Angeles Philharmonic with composer/conductor John Adams.

Bermel's output includes pieces for various performing forces including orchestral pieces as well as string quartets and solo piano music. A rather substantial piece in his catalogue is Soul Garden for solo viola, cello and string quartet. The piece gained quite some publicity when The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center (who commissioned the piece) only performed a portion of the piece, starting from the beginning and ending arbitrarily some 9 minutes into the piece because of supposed time constraints. Soul Garden is typical of recent Bermel works in that it focuses on the motif of "sighing." Bermel likens sensuous glissandi on the strings to human sighing and the same motif has appeared in many of his other works as well. The roots of the motif seem to originate from gospel and jazz music rather than from traditional classical performance.

Other works by Bermel include Slides for orchestra (commissioned by the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra), Turning for piano solo, Three Rivers for large ensemble and Tied Shifts for sextet.

Bermel is also an avid performing musician and has been seen playing with rock and funk groups including his own group TONK, for which he serves as music director, and the rock band Peace by Piece, in which he performs on vocals, keyboards and caxixi. He has also performed many pieces on the clarinet including his own concerto. He often jokes that he has a "loose" embouchure and was playing the clarinet incorrectly. Strangely enough, his old clarinet teacher told him years later that his method worked so well that he changed all his students to play with Bermel's "wrong" embouchure.

Besides his activity as a composer and performer, Bermel has also been involved with the education of a new generation of composers through the New York Youth Symphony workshop for young composers, "Making Score" in which he serves as director.

Bermel's music is published by Peer Music Classical in the United States and is distributed in Europe, Australia and New Zealand by Faber Music.

He begins a three-year residency with the American Composers Orchestra in Fall of 2006.