Biography:
Marty Regan was born and raised in New York and graduated from Oberlin College in 1995 with a B.M. in Composition and a B.A. in English and East Asian studies, where his principal compositions teachers were Randolph Coleman, Kathryn Alexander, and Param Vir. He received full-tuition scholarships to attend the American Conservatory in Fontainbleau, France in 1992, where he studied composition with Byron Adams, and the Aspen School of Music in Aspen, Colorado in 1993. In the summer of 1995, he participated in a three-week master class with John Corigliano, George Rochberg, and John Harbison. Earlier the same year he also studied at the Schöenberg House in Mödling, Austria withRichard Hoffman. In 1996 and 1997, he received a scholarship for foreign students to attend the Akiyoshidai Festival and Seminar ofContemporary Music held in Yamaguchi Prefecture, Japan.
His output includes a wide range of compositions for numerous chamber ensembles, choir, and chamber orchestras, film, and dance. Since 1993, he has been interested in integrating Japanese aesthetic sensibilities into his work, and is active as a composer of gendai-hôgaku (contemporary music for traditional Japanese instruments) in Japan. From 2000-2002 he studied composition and traditional Japanese music as a Japanese government-sponsored research student at Tokyo College of Music. His composition for six Japanese instruments, “Three Japanese Soundscapes”,was premiered at the National Theater of Japan in June 2001 as part ofthe 4th Annual Composition Competition for Traditional JapaneseInstruments. As the first American composer to be selected for thiscompetition, CBS News, Tokyo produced a piece about his life in Japanas a composer. In June 2002, his composition “Shinonome no Uta (‘Song-Poem of the Eastern Clouds’)” was selected for the 5th Annual Composition Competition for Traditional Japanese Instruments at the National Theater of Japan and won 2nd prize.
He is active as a composer and conductor in AURA-J, a chamber ensemble of Japanese instrumentalists devoted to developing new repertoire for traditional Japanese instruments. In 2005, he was awarded the Tai Hei Shakuhachi Scholarship in recognition of his efforts in advocating the Japanese performing arts abroad and studied traditional Korean music at theNational Center for the Korean Traditional Performing Arts under the auspices of the Korea Foundation. He spent the 2005-2006 academic yearin Tokyo working on his dissertation under the auspices of the Japan Foundation Doctoral Fellowship and the Andrew Nyborg Fellowship in Music and completed his Ph.D. in Music with an emphasis in Composition at the University of Hawai’i, Manoa in December 2006. His English translation of Minoru Miki’s book, Composing for Japanese Instruments was published by the University of Rochester Press in 2008. His music is recorded on SION Records and other independent labels in Japan. He teaches music theory and form and analysis in the Department of Performance Studies, and his courses draw upon theories and concepts from non-Western musical traditions.
