Shulamit Ran
Born: October 21, 1949, Tel Aviv, Israel
BIOGRAPHY MUSIC RECORDINGS SOURCES
Shulamit Ran was born in Tel Aviv in 1949 to a German father and a Russian mother. By the time she was eight, Ran began composing short songs and melodies that were sometimes featured on the Israeli radio, which fueled her determination to compose more. She began formal training at the Tel Aviv Conservatory but left to pursue compositional studies with noted Israeli composers, Paul Ben Haim and Alexander Boskovich, and piano with Miriam Boskovich. She received a scholarship at age 14 to study piano at the Mannes School of Music in New York with Nadia Reisenberg and composition with Norman Dello Joio.
Ran established an outstanding reputation as a pianist in the United States, Canada, Europe, Israel, and Argentina. She performed her own work, Capriccio, with the New York Philharmonic in 1963, conducted by Leonard Bernstein, which was also broadcast during a “Young People’s Concert.”
In the 1970s Ran became an Artist in Residence at St. Mary’s University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and later took an Assistant Professor position at the University of Chicago.
While in Chicago, she concentrated on writing chamber works and married and had two children with Dr. Avraham Lofton in the 1980s.
She held a visiting professorship at Princeton University in 1987, which was cut short by surgery for a tumor at the base of her skull. A few years later she received a Pulitzer Prize for a 3-movement symphony commissioned by the Philadelphia Orchestra while she was on a sabbatical from teaching.
From 1994-1997, Ran was a composer-in-residence at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, where her first opera, Between Two Worlds, was performed. Her music is described as being freely atonal or pantonal, containing tonal points of reference. Her works often include nontraditional graphic notations such as “scream,” “get wilder,” and “brooding.”
Ran’s chamber music, concerti, and symphonies have been performed by major orchestras including the Chicago Symphony, Cleveland Orchestra, Philadelphia Orchestra, Israel Philharmonic, American Composers Orchestra (Concerto for Orchestra), Orchestra of St. Luke’s, Baltimore Symphony, and the National Symphony. Ran has earned 5 honorary doctorates throughout her career and has been a visiting Professor of Composition at Eastman School of Music and a music director of Tempus Fugit in Israel. She continues her composing to this day.
“I know what a woman is, and I know what a composer is, and I have no idea
what the two have to do with one another. I do not think of music as being typed by
gender.”