Individual Listing

0146 ARTS
University of California
Riverside, CA 92521

Adams, Byron

Professor of Music

College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences

Music


Biography

Byron Adams (b. 1955) earned a Bachelor of Music degree, magna cum laude, from Jacksonville University, studying piano with Mary Lou Wesley Krosnick and composition with Gurney Kennedy. He received a Master of Music degree from the University of Southern California, where his teachers included Halsey Stevens, Robert Linn and Morten Lauridsen. He received his doctoral degree from Cornell University, studying composition with Karel Husa and musicology with William W. Austin. Byron Adams has had performances of his music in Europe, such as at the 26 th “Warsaw Autumn” International Festival of Contemporary Music in Poland, the Leith Hill Festival in England, the Conservatoire Américain in Fontainebleau, France, and the Armenian Philharmonic Orchestra. His music has been performed in America by such institutions as the Syracuse Symphony Orchestra, the new music ensemble Xtet, Chamber Music Palisades Cantori New York and at the Biennial National Convention of the American Guild of Organists in 2004. Byron Adams’s scholarly work was recognized when he was awarded the first Ralph Vaughan Williams Research Fellowship in 1985. He has published widely on the subject of twentieth-century English music, giving lectures and interviews on this topic over the BBC, at the 1995 and 2003 National Meetings of the American Musicological Society and at Oxford University. He was co-editor of Vaughan Williams Essays, a volume published by Ashgate Press. Articles and reviews by Prof. Adams have appeared in 19 th Century Music, American Music, Music and Letters, MLA Notes, Current Musicology, and The Musical Quarterly. Essays by Prof. Adams have been published in the volumes Vaughan Williams Studies, Walt Whitman and Modern Music and Queer Episodes in Music and Modern Identity. Prof. Adams has contributed four entries to the revised edition of the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, including those on Husa and Walton. An extended essay on Elgar’s later oratorios appeared in the Cambridge Companion to Elgar (2004). In 2000, the American Musicological Society bestowed the Philip Brett Award on Prof. Adams for two essays dealing with nationalism and homoeroticism in twentieth-century English music. Prof. Adams had held several offices: He was appointed Composer in Residence of the Colonial Symphony during the 1990-91 and 1991-92 seasons; during the summer of 1992, Prof. Adams taught solfège, composition and conducted the chorale at the Conservatoire Américain in Fontainebleau, France.

Former Institution

 Cornell University

Degrees

BM Piano Performance 1977

Jacksonville University

MM Music Composition 1978

University of Southern California

DMA Music Composition 1984

Cornell

Research Area

Composition Vaughan Williams and English Music Issues of culture and nationalism in 20th-century music

Publications

Editions BIM, E.C. Schirmer, Southern Music Co., Earthsongs, Encore Music and Yelton Rhodes all publish music by Byron Adams. Recorded performances of his music are available on the Orion Master Recordings, Skylark, and Mark record labels