At 4 p.m. today, Makan will speak at Ford-Crawford Hall in the Jacobs School of Music.
Makan was raised in New Jersey by parents of South African, Indian and Russian Jewish descent. After training as a violinist, he received degrees in composition and religion from Oberlin and completed his doctorate in composition at the University of California, Berkeley. He also studied in Helsinki and Paris.
The New Yorker described Makan as “an arrestingly gifted young American composer,” and he is also depicted as “consistently stimulating” by the New York Times. The Boston Globe said Makan is a composer “whose music deserves to be more widely heard,” according to the Jacobs School of Music website.
He is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Luciano Berio Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, which is the oldest American overseas center for independent study and advanced research in the arts and humanities. Each year, through a national juried competition, the Academy offers approximately 30 Rome Prize fellowships, according to the American Academy in Rome website.
Makan has also received awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; the Fromm Music Foundation; Meet the Composer; the Aaron Copland House; the Utah Arts Festival; the Fulbright Program; and the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers.
His work has been commissioned by the Bang on a Can All-Stars, American Composers Orchestra, Harvard Musical Association and Carnegie Hall, among others.
His CDs “In Sound,” “Target” and “Afterglow” include performances by the Kronos Quartet, Either/Or and the International Contemporary Ensemble.
His opera “Persona,” written for Alarm Will Sound and produced by Beth Morrison, is an adaptation of Ingmar Bergman’s classic film with libretto and direction by Jay Scheib. “Persona” is described as a provocative, highly cerebral and artistically complex depiction of human frailty, cruelty and identity, according to the Beth Morrison Projects’ website.
Makan lives in Cambridge, Mass., where he is an associate professor of music at the Massachusetts Institute of ?Technology.
Lanie Maresh
