Arthur Gottschalk

A man whose music is described as “infectious , loud, and fun” (Gramophone Magazine), and “fascinatingly strange” (BBC Music Magazine), award-winning composer Arthur Gottschalk is Professor of Music Composition at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music, where he founded and directed the school’s electronic music laboratories until 2002, and chaired the composition and theory department from 1997 to 2010.

Additionally, he co-founded Modern Music Ventures, Inc., a company which held a recording studio complex, a record production division, four publishing firms, and an artist management division, and for whom he produced records for the PolyGram and Capitol labels, among others. He continues to work as an expert witness and forensic musicologist in music business trials and serves as a judge for many prominent competitions, including CINE (the Marvin Hamlisch Award), CINTAS (Cintas Foundations Awards), and the University of Louisville (the Grawemeyer Award), among others.

He is a recipient of the Charles Ives Prize of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, annual ASCAP Awards since 1980, and has been a Composer-in-Residence at the famed Columbia/Princeton Electronic Music Center, the Piccolo Spoleto Festival, and a Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome. He was recently awarded the Gold Medal and Record of the Year in Music Composition from the Global Music Awards, for his Requiem: For the Living, and honored with a prestigious Bogliasco Fellowship, the First Prize of the Concorso Internazionale di Composizione Originale of Corciano, Italy, for his Concerto for Violin and Symphonic Winds, and completed the presentation of an electronic music series in Havana, Cuba.

The Association of Rice Alumni honored him with their 2016 Meritorious Service Award, the highest honor given to a non-graduate of Rice University. In 2018 his music was presented at Carnegie Hall by a group of Italian virtuosi, he was featured composer at the Thailand International Festival, and was a Fellow at The MacDowell Colony; he was a featured composer at the 2019 China-ASEAN Festival in Nanning, China. With his catalog now over two hundred compositions, his music is regularly performed domestically and overseas, with over 45 recordings on such labels as Navona, Crystal, Naxos, Amirani (Italy), and Delage (France). His orchestral works have been performed by the symphony orchestras of Charleston, Vienna, Bratislava, Galicia (Spain), Fargo-Moorehead, Indianapolis, Houston, Pacific, Atlanta, Thailand, Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Guangxi (China), among others.

His music is published by Subito Music, Shawnee Press, European American Music Distributors, the International Horn Society, Potenza Music, SMP Press, Alea Publishing, TrevCo Music, The Spectrum Press, and Delage Music (France). His book, Functional Hearing, now entering its second edition, is published by Scarecrow Press, a division of Rowman & Littlefield. He was a student of renowned American composers William Bolcom, Ross Lee Finney, and Leslie Bassett, and worked also with Mario Davidovsky and Aaron Copland. He likes to explore the interstices between popular and art music, and between the Sacred and Profane.