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		Martin Bresnick, Aaron Jay Kernis, Ezra Laderman, Ingram Marshall (visiting 2006-2007), and guests The program focuses on studies in composition, including computer music and recording techniques. In addition, composers are urged to continue to develop competency both as instrumentalists and conductors. Students are encouraged to take as many courses as possible in music history and literature, and are required to complete successfully courses in the analysis of tonal and nontonal music. Composers are expected to produce enough work in their two-year residency for one full concert. These works are interspersed during the six to eight concerts given each year under the rubric New Music New Haven. One of the most effective features of the composition program is provided by regular visits of distinguished visiting composers who serve on the teaching faculty. Gilbert Amy, Louis Andriessen, Earle Brown, Anthony Davis, Lukas Foss, Betsy `Jolas, Leon Kirchner, Zygmunt Krause, David Lang,Tania Léon, Nicholas Maw, Marlos Nobré, Roger Reynolds, Poul Ruders, Frederic Rzewski, Roberto Sierra, Morton Subotnick, Nicholas Thorne, and Charles Wuorinen have each taught for one term in the composition program.


				The music of Martin Bresnick has been performed in festivals and concerts throughout the world. His compositions, written in virtually every medium from chamber and symphonic music to film and computer music, are sharply focused, expressive, and structurally intriguing. He has won numerous prizes including the Rome Prize, the Stoeger Prize for Chamber Music from the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, the first Charles Ives Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Aaron Copland Award for teaching from ASCAP, a Berlin Prize Fellowship from the American Academy in Berlin and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He has been commissioned by the Koussevitzky and Fromm foundations, Chamber Music America, Meet-the-Composer, the National Endowment for the Arts as well as individual ensembles and performers. His work is represented by Carl Fischer Music Publishers, and is recorded by CRI, New World, Centaur, Artifact Music, and Albany Records. He joined the Yale faculty in 1981, and is currently Professor of Composition and Coordinator of the Composition Department.
				Aaron Jay Kernis, one of the youngest composers ever to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize, has become among the most esteemed musical figures of his generation. He has written works for many of America's foremost musical institutions and artists, including the New York Philharmonic, the San Francisco Symphony, the Birmingham [England] New Music Group, the Birmingham Bach Choir, the Minnesota Orchestra, the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, Aspen Music Festival, and Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, Christopher O'Riley, Renée Fleming Pamela Frank, Paul Neubauer, Carter Brey, Joshua Bell, Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg and Sharon Isbin. Aaron Jay Kernis was born in Philadelphia and began his musical studies on the violin; at age 12 he began teaching himself piano, and, in the following year, composition. He continued his studies at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, the Manhattan School of Music, and the Yale School of Music, working with composers as diverse as John Adams, Charles Wuorinen, and Jacob Druckman. In addition to the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for his String Quartet No. 2 (musica instrumentalis), his many awards have included the 2002 Grawemeyer Award in Music Composition for the cello and orchestra version of Colored Field, the Stoeger Prize from the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Rome Prize, two NEA grants, a Bearns Prize, a New York Foundation for the Arts Award, and three BMI Student Composer Awards. Currently he serves as the Minnesota Orchestra's New Music Advisor. Mr. Kernis joined the Yale Faculty in 2003.
				Ezra Laderman, composition, is a distinguished and widely performed composer. His commissions have included works for the New York Philharmonic, Chicago Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, Pittsburgh Symphony, and orchestras of Minnesota, Dallas, Louisville, Houston, Detroit, Albany, Denver, New Jersey, Indianapolis, Syracuse, and New Haven; and for the New York City, Turnau, and Tri- Cities Operas. He has written for such chamber ensembles as the Tokyo, Juilliard, Concord, Colorado, Lenox, Vermeer, Audubon, and Composers quartets; and for soloists Yo-Yo Ma, Judith Raskin, Elmar Oliveira, Jean-Pierre Rampal, Samuel Baron, Sherrill Milnes, Emanuel Ax, Eugene List, Ronald Roseman, Bernard Garfield, and Ilana Vered, among many others. Mr. Laderman is the recipient of three Guggenheim fellowships, the Prix de Rome, and Rockefeller and Ford Foundation grants. He has served as president of the NEA Music Program, and president of the American Music Center. In 1990 Mr. Laderman was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Mr. Laderman was Dean from 1989 to 1995.
				Ingram Marshall, composer, lived and worked in the San Francisco Bay Area from 1973 to 1985 and in Washington State, where he taught at Evergreen State College, until 1989. His current base is Connecticut. He studied at Columbia University and California Institute of the Arts, where he received an M.F.A., and has been a student of Indonesian gamelan music, the influence of which may be heard in the slowed-down sense of time and use of melodic repetition found in many of his pieces. In the mid-seventies he developed a series of "live electronic" pieces such as Fragility Cycles, Gradual Requiem and Alcatraz in which he blended tape collages, extended vocal techniques, Indonesian flutes and keyboards. He performed widely in the USA and Europe with these works. In recent years he has concentrated on music combining tape and electronic processing with ensembles and soloists. His music has been performed by ensembles and orchestras such as the Theater of Voices, Kronos Quartet, Bang on a Can All-Stars, Los Angeles Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, St. Louis Symphony and American Composers Orchestra. He has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Rockefeller Foundation, Fromm Foundation, Guggenheim Foundation and American Academy of Arts and Letters. His most recent recordings are on Nonesuch (Kingdom Come) and New Albion (Dark Waters). Among recent chamber works are Muddy Waters, which was commissioned and performed by the Bang on a Can All-Stars, and In Deserto (SmokeCreek) commissioned by Chamber Music America for the ensemble Clogs. January 2004 saw the premiere of Bright Kingdoms, commissioned by Magnum Opus/ Meet the Composer, and performed by the Oakland-East Bay Symphony under Michael Morgan. The American Composers Orchestra in New York premiered his new concerto for two guitars and orchestra, Dark Florescence, at Carnegie Hall in February 2005.