David Felder

He was also the director of both the June in Buffalo Festival and the Robert and Carol Morris Center for 21st Century Music.

David Felder (born November 27, 1953) is an American composer and academic who was a SUNY Distinguished Professor at the University at Buffalo until his retirement in 2022.

Felder was born in Cleveland, Ohio on November 27, 1953, and joined the Cleveland Orchestra Chorus as a child, where he sang as a tenor under Pierre Boulez.

He received a Bachelor of Music in 1975 and a Master of Music in 1977, both from Miami University.

Felder spent the next two years in Cleveland teaching electronic music and recording at the Cleveland Institute of Music and studying composition privately with Donald Erb.

Felder earned a PhD in music composition at the University of California, San Diego, where he studied with Roger Reynolds, Bernard Rands, Robert Erickson, and Joji Yuasa

The June in Buffalo Festival was founded at the University at Buffalo in 1975 by composer and UB Professor Morton Feldman, with sponsorship by the Rockefeller Foundation, New York State Council for the Arts, and the university at Buffalo.

The festival was originally dedicated to emerging composers and to presenting and exposing new music to the world.

The festival ran until 1980 and took a brief a hiatus until 1985 when David Felder revived the festival.

Felder taught music composition at the University at Buffalo from 1985 to 2022, received the SUNY Distinguished Professor title in 2008, and served as Master Artist in Residence at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in 2010.

From 1985 to 2022, Felder was the director of June in Buffalo, and expanded the program to include student composers, as well as, recently, student ensembles.

June in Buffalo has run every June since 1985, and offers a week-long intensive schedule of seminars, lectures, workshops, professional presentations, participant forums and open rehearsals as well as afternoon and evening concerts open to the general public and critics.

Each of the invited composers has one of their pieces performed during the festival.

Evening performances feature faculty composers, resident ensembles and soloists renowned internationally as interpreters of contemporary music.

Felder was the Composer-in-Residence of the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra from 1993 to 1997 and has received numerous grants and commissions throughout his career as a composer, including many awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, two New York State Council commissions, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, two Koussevitzky commissions, two Fromm Foundation Fellowships, two awards from the Rockefeller Foundation, two commissions from the Mary Flagler Cary Trust, and many more.

June in Buffalo boasts a resident ensemble that performs regularly at the festival, the Slee Sinfonietta, which Felder co-founded with conductor Magnus Martensson, and began as artistic director in 1996.

The Slee Sinfonietta is the professional chamber orchestra in residence at the university at Buffalo and presents a series of concerts each year that feature performances of challenging new works by contemporary composers and lesser-known works from the chamber orchestra repertoire.

The Slee Sinfonietta consists of a core group including UB faculty performance artists, visiting artists, national and regional professionals and advanced performance students, and conducted by leading conductors and composers.

The June in Buffalo Festival enjoys sponsorship from the Robert and Carol Morris Center for 21st Century Music, which Felder founded in 2006, and acted as artistic director until his retirement in 2022.

In 2010, the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded Felder the Music Award in recognition of his career accomplishments.

His, Les Quatres Temps Cardinaux (2013–14), for chamber orchestra, soprano, bass voice, and electronics, has been recorded by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project and is soon to be released.

In 2015 he was named co-director of the university at Buffalo's Creative Arts Initiative, a plan to bring major international creative artists to the region as guest artists.

All works are published by the Theodore Presser Company and Schott Music.

Felder's music is featured on several solo discs, and included on many albums released by individual artists and new music groups, as well as on a joint release with Morton Feldman.

His works have been released on a variety of labels including Bridge Records, Mode Records, Albany Records, and others.

As an active teacher and mentor, he has served as Ph.D. dissertation advisor for nearly fifty composers at Buffalo, many of whom are actively teaching, composing and performing internationally at leading institutions.

More recently, his violin concerto, Jeu de Tarot (2017), with violin soloist Irvine Arditti, and Ensemble Signal, conducted by Brad Lubman, has been recorded and released on Coviello Contemporary records.

His latest work for orchestra, Die Dämmerungen, was given its complete world premiere by the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra on October 5, 2019, at Kleinhans Music Hall.

Jeu de Tarot 2 (2020) has been recently recorded by the Slee Sinfonietta, with violin soloist Irvine Arditti, conducted by Christian Baldini, and will soon be released by Coviello Contemporary records.