Dean Rosenthal :: About

Dean Rosenthal is an American composer of and writer on contemporary and experimental music, field recordings, digital pastiche, sound collage, and installations; performer, writer on music, and theorist; his instrumental music has been described as "thorny" and "modernist" (The New Yorker) and "original" (The New York Times). His works are performed, broadcast, choreographed, and installed internationally, primarily in North America and Europe at venues such as Brooklyn Museum, Ohrenhoch der Geräuschladen, Spectrum, Center for Collaborative Arts and Media at Yale, The Wulf, Electronic Music Foundation, Symphony Space, Elastic Arts, Incubator Arts Project, at many universities and art schools, and outdoors, in situ, over 50 times across three continents, for Stones/Water/Time/Breath. He is the author of The American Experimental Music Century - An Oral History, the first oral history of American experimental music of the twentieth century. Some of his writings have been published in The Open Space Magazine, The Ear Reader, Musicworks, and other contemporary publications. Beginning in 2015, he worked closely with Guggenheim Fellow David Parker's dance company The Bang Group, utilizing contemporary dance to express his instrumental music; this music was heard in dozens of performances from the Brooklyn Museum to hallowed dance center Jacob's Pillow to the Claquettes Club in Liege, Belgium; "Turing Tests" continues to be performed in their ongoing repertory. A commission from the Oral History of American Music collection at Yale, "There Was Only One of Her," was first heard in 2020 and is archived, with sketches, in the The Rodgers and Hammerstein Archives of Recorded Sound of The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Widely performed, Stones/Water/Time/Breath was given a 10 city, 3 country performance in 2016 as part of the international Make Music Day festival, these performances became an annual event that ran for 6 years in Europe, North America, and South America. Stones/Water/Time/Breath was released as a recording by Edition Wandelweiser Records, documenting five live performances from Newfoundland to Brooklyn to New York to Wilbraham, Massachusetts, the composer's hometown. Listen to Stones/Water/Time/Breath. In May of 2021, Tone Glow Records released an archival recording of Cornelius Cardew's "The Great Learning" performed by the Montreal Scratch Orchestra that was organized and conducted by the composer and received vibrant reviews. Listen Here Currently, he is based primarily in Paris, where he continues to compose and is preparing a pedagogical edition of experimental music for piano.