Derek Bermel

Bermel began a three-year residency with the American Composers Orchestra in Fall of 2006 and currently serves on the ACO board. In 2009 Bermel began his three-year tenure as composer-in-residence with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra as well as his position as artist-in-residence at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, where he currently lives and works.

Derek Bermel (born 1967, in New York City) is an American composer, clarinetist and conductor whose music blends various facets of world music, funk and jazz with largely classical performing forces and musical vocabulary. He is the recipient of various awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship and the American Academy in Rome's Rome Prize awarded to artists for a year-long residency in Rome.

Bermel's output includes pieces for a variety of performing forces, including solo vocal songs, pieces for large and small chamber ensembles, and fourteen orchestral works. Though the ensembles he writes for are largely classical, his voice as a composer has been heavily influenced by both his travels and his education in Western art and popular music. His orchestral work A shout, a whisper, and a trace is a good example of this interplay, as it draws on Bermel's knowledge of the Thracian folk style and the work of fellow ethnomusicologist and classical composer Béla Bartók. Moreover, the piece engages directly with the experience of living in an unfamiliar culture, drawing on Bartók's letters home from New York during the last five years of his life. He first came into the national spotlight with works like Natural Selection, a series of animal portraits for baritone and ensemble, and Voices, a concerto for clarinet and orchestra which he wrote for himself to perform. The piece was premiered by the American Composers Orchestra under the baton of the composer/conductor Tan Dun and has since been performed by many other ensembles and conductors, including the Los Angeles Philharmonic under the baton of composer/conductor John Adams. Other important works include his "Migration Series," a piece for jazz band and orchestra that draws on impressions of Jacob Lawrence's set of 60 paintings by the same name depicting the mass movement of African-Americans from the South to the North at the beginning of the 20th century, and "Soul Garden," a viola solo accompanied by string quintet that utilizes quarter-tones and slides to emulate the vocal effects of a gospel singer. "Soul Garden" in particular reflects what Richard Scheinen, jazz writer for the San Jose Mercury News, has called Bermel's preoccupation with "the human voice--or more generally, language and the yearning the communicate.". This artistic concern is equally evident in lighter pieces such as "Language Instruction," a humorous work for clarinet, viola, cello, and piano in which the clarinet plays the role of the voice on a language tape and the other three instruments students with various degrees of aptitude for the task at hand.