Anthony Brandt

Composer Anthony Brandt (b. 1961) earned his degrees from California Institute of the Arts (MA '87) and Harvard University (BA '83, PhD '93). His honors include a Koussevitzky Commission from the Library of Congress and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Meet-the-Composer, the Houston Arts Alliance, the New England Foundation for the Arts and the Margaret Fairbank Jory Copying Assistance Program. He has been commissioned by the River Oaks Chamber Orchestra, the Metamorphosen Chamber Orchestra, Da Camera of Houston, the SOLI ensemble, Houston Ballet II, the Bowdoin International Festival, the Moores School of Music Percussion Ensemble, the Webster Trio, the Fischer Duo and others. He has been a fellow at the Wellesley Composers Conference, the Tanglewood Institute, the MacDowell Colony and the Djerassi Resident Artists Colony, a Visiting Composer at the Bowdoin International Festival, the FICA Festival at the University of Veracruz, the Bremen Musikfest, Baltimore’s New Chamber Arts Festival, Southwestern University, SUNY- Buffalo and Cleveland State University, and Composer-in-Residence of Houston’s OrchestraX and the International Festival of Music in Morelia, Mexico. Recent works include the chamber opera Ulysses, Home, with a libretto by playwright Neena Beber, about a soldier with post-traumatic stress disorder. An album of his vocal music, including his chamber opera The Birth of Something, with a libretto by playwright Will Eno, is available on Albany Records (Troy 1144).

Dr. Brandt is co-founder and Artistic Director of the Houston-based contemporary music ensemble Musiqa (www.musiqahouston.org), two-time winners of Adventurous Programming Awards from Chamber Music America and ASCAP (2013 and '16). Musiqa presents subscription concerts at the Hobby Center and free loft concerts at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. Musiqa’s free educational programs have served over 50,000 public elementary school students in the past twelve years and have won eight awards from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Dr. Brandt and neuroscientist David Eagleman have co-authored "The Runaway Species: How Human Creativity Remakes the World," to be published in October 2017 by Catapult (United States) and Canongate (United Kingdom), as well as publishing houses in Brazil, China, Germany and Korea.

Dr. Brandt is the author of an innovative, web-based music appreciation course called “Sound Reasoning” (www.soundreasoning.org), created for Rice University’s OpenStax. “Sound Reasoning” was awarded an Access to Artistic Excellence Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. He has organized three international conferences at Rice on “Exploring the Mind through Music," most recently in June 2016. He has co-authored papers published in the journals Frontiers and Brain Connectivity and serves on the Advisory Board of Methodist Hospital’s Center for Performing Arts Medicine, where he is a principal investigator in a research project involving music and stroke recovery.

Dr. Brandt is a Professor of Composition and Theory at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music. He has been awarded the University’s Phi Beta Kappa and George R. Brown teaching prizes.