Biography
Composer and clarinetist Derek Bermel has been featured at major concert halls and festivals worldwide. Joshua Kosman of the San Francisco Chronicle writes, “To listen to his music is to run across a wealth of influences, from Bartók and Stravinsky to big band, and from early-period rap to Bulgarian folk music to West African drumming. Also, it seems, theoretical physics.” He studied Thracian folk style with Nikola Iliev in Bulgaria, uillean pipes with Mick O’Brien in Dublin, Lobi xylophone with Ngmen Baaru in Ghana, caxixi in Brazil with Júlio Góes, and ethnomusicology and orchestration with André Hajdu in Jerusalem. Bermel’s composition teachers include Louis Andriessen, Bill Albright, William Bolcom, Henri Dutilleux, André Hajdu, and Michael Tenzer.
He has scored several films and collaborated with a dizzying array of artists including writers Sandra Cisneros, Will Eno, Nicole Krauss, and Wendy S. Walters, visual artists Sook-Jin Jo, Kevin Jerome Everson, and Shimon Attie, composer/ performers Wynton Marsalis, Midori, Paquito D’Rivera, Christopher Taylor, and Luciana Souza, choreographer S. Ama Wray, and hiphop artist Yasiin Bey (Mos Def).
Bermel is thrice GRAMMY-nominated, twice for Best Contemporary Composition—for Migration Series for Jazz Band and Orchestra, dedicated to Wynton Marsalis, and for Intonations for the JACK Quartet—and once as Best Soloist with Orchestra for Voices, a clarinet concerto he has performed on four continents. His discography includes Migrations with the Albany Symphony and Juilliard Jazz Orchestra (Naxos); Intonations with the JACK Quartet (Naxos); Voices with Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP/Sound); Soul Garden, small ensemble/solo music (New World/CRI); and Canzonas Americanas with Alarm Will Sound (Cantaloupe).
He has become recognized as a dynamic and unconventional curator of concert series, including three SONiC Festivals as artistic director with the American Composers Orchestra, the Gamper Festival at the Bowdoin International Music Festival, and the Cone Series at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (where he served four years as Artist-in-Residence).
Over the years he has received commissions from the Pittsburgh, National, Seattle, Saint Louis, and Pacific Symphonies, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Glimmerglass Opera Festival, WNYC Radio, La Jolla Music Society, Seattle Chamber Music Festival, eighth blackbird, Guarneri String Quartet, Music From Copland House, and the Koussevitzky and Fromm Foundations. Honors include the Alpert Award in the Arts, Rome Prize, Guggenheim and Fulbright Fellowships, and the American Music Center's Trailblazer Award. Recent residencies include Nuova Consonanza Festival in Rome, IC Festival in Hong-Kong, Kempten Classix in Germany, Beijing Modern Music Festival, and Hyllos, a collaboration with Veenfabriek and Asko|Schönberg Ensemble in the Netherlands. In 2025 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Bermel holds B.A. and D.M.A. degrees from Yale University and the University of Michigan. Notable among his composition teachers are William Albright, Louis Andriessen, William Bolcom, Henri Dutilleux, and Michael Tenzer. His music is published by Peermusic Classical (Americas, Asia) and Faber Music (Europe, Australia).