Composer Daniel Bernard Roumain, BMus’93, to teach at Blair

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The Blair School of Music announces the appointment of nationally hailed composer, performer, violinist, bandleader and alumnus Daniel Bernard Roumain (DBR) as visiting associate professor of composition for the 2009–10 academic year.

Daniel Bernard Roumain, BMus'93, will be visiting associate professor of composition at Blair for the 2009-10 academic year.

“This is a signal event in the evolution of the Blair school, as an alumnus who has attained national renown as a performer and composer returns to teach another generation of classical music artists at Vanderbilt,” Dean Mark Wait said. “Our students are immensely fortunate that DBR is available for this teaching appointment. He will make extended residency visits to Blair two or three times each semester, and will work with student string quartets and teach extended techniques and performance art.”

DBR’s residency dates at the Blair school are scheduled for September 10–14; October 14–19; January 24–28; March 16–19; and April 19–22. The October residency will take place in connection with DBR’s performance for Vanderbilt’s Great Performances Series on Saturday, October 17, in Blair’s Ingram Hall. Blair students and faculty will perform with DBR on this concert. Ticket information for this concert is at www.vanderbilt.edu/greatperformances.

More information about master classes, performances, lectures and other activities will be released in connection with the residency period.

DBR melds his classical music roots with his own cultural references and vibrant musical imagination. In 2007, he premiered One Loss Plus, the first of three works commissioned by the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) for their Next Wave Festival. His latest orchestral work and second BAM commission, Darwin’s Meditation for the People of Lincoln is a musical setting of a play by Daniel Beaty that explores an imagined conversation between Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln, and the political relationship between England, North America and Haiti. Following its New York premiere in October 2008, Darwin’s Meditation for the People of Lincoln moved to the University of Connecticut as a special celebratory concert on February 12, 2009—the icons’ shared bicentennial anniversary of their birth.

Other recent performances and commissions include: Five Chairs and One Table, a commissioned work for Imani Winds premiering at Carnegie Hall in 2009; WE MARCH!, a guitar concerto premiered by Eliot Fisk and the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra; The Tuscaloosa Meditations, commissioned by the University of Alabama; Voodoo Violin Concerto, premiered by the Vermont Youth Orchestra; Double Quartet: The Kompa Variations, for the Providence String Quartet; a student quartet which premiered at the First Works Providence festival; and newly commissioned works for the Florida Youth Orchestra, Ahn Trio and Claremont Trio.

As bandleader of DBR and the Mission, he presents an electrifying show described as “an evening of chamber music with the accessible feel of a rock concert” (Albany Times-Union). Touring nationwide since 2004, DBR and the Mission made its international debut at Australia’s 2008 Adelaide Festival.

DBR serves as artist-in-residence of the Starbucks-sponsored Seattle Theatre Group and as music director of Seattle’s More Music @ The Moore program for the third consecutive year. A native of Margate, Fla., DBR completed his master’s and doctoral work at the University of Michigan under the tutelage of Pulitzer Prize-winning composer William Bolcom.

© 2012 Vanderbilt University | Photo credit: Julieta Cervantes

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