Dan Welcher

You may hear a Great Songs program which features an interview with Dan the songs he has written.

Dan Welcher is an eminent American composer who has written over 80 works, including more than twenty orchestral works, an opera, works for wind ensemble, choral music and many combinations of chamber music. He has written two art song cycles, as well as a great number of individual songs with various types of accompaniment. Mr. Welcher is currently Professor of Composition at the University of Texas in Austin, where he also conducts both the New Music Ensemble and the University of Texas Opera Theater. His music is represented on more than a dozen CD recordings on the New World, Marco Polo, Crystal, Gasparo, Summit, and Klavier labels.

Here is a more expansive summary of Welcher's work.

Critic Royal S. Brown, writing in High Fidelity magazine in 1974, called Dan Welcher "one of the most promising American composers I have heard". Welcher has been steadily fulfilling that promise ever since. With over seventy works to his credit, more than half of which are published, Welcher has written in virtually every medium, including opera, concerto, symphony, wind ensemble, vocal literature, piano solos, and various kinds of chamber music. Also a highly respected conductor, Welcher has made guest appearances with a number of leading professional orchestras and ensembles in the US, and was for ten years Assistant Conductor of the Austin Symphony Orchestra.

Dan Welcher has won numerous awards and prizes from institutions such as the Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, The Reader's Digest/Lila Wallace Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, Meet The Composer, the MacDowell Colony, the American Music Center, and ASCAP. From 1990 to 1993, he was Composer in Residence with the Honolulu Symphony Orchestra (Donald Johanos, Music Director). His orchestral music has been performed by more than fifty orchestras, including the Chicago Symphony, the St. Louis Symphony, and the Dallas Symphony. His recent large works include an orchestral work commissioned by the Dallas Symphony Orchestra entitled BRIGHT WINGS: VALEDICTION FOR LARGE ORCHESTRA, premiered in Dallas in March of 1997; an overture entitled SPUMANTE commissioned by the Boston Pops, and premiered by that orchestra under its Music Director, Keith Lockhart, in May of 1998; an oboe concerto entitled VENTI DI MARE premiered in February 1999 by oboist John Snow with the Rochester Philharmonic under Peter Bay, and JFK: THE VOICE OF PEACE, an hour-long oratorio for narrator, solo cello, chorus and orchestra, premiered by the Handel & Haydn Society Orchestra and Chorus, with cellist Paul Tobias and narrator David McCullough, in March 1999. Dan Welcher holds the Lee Hage Jamail Regents Professorship in Composition at The University of Texas at Austin.

Mr. Welcher has written: "'Great Songs' was the prototype for my own show 'Knowing the Score' (which is now being produce at radio station KMFA-Fm in Austin, Texas, and which was the 1999 winner of the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Broadcst Award)..."