#Composition

On Saturday, October 1, The UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music will host a celebration of William Kraft. Kraft, who taught composition at UCLA in the 1980s after a thirty-year career in the Los Angeles Philharmonic, was an indispensable feature of Los Angeles’s vibrant new music scene in the post-World War II era. “Bill was

READ: Remembering Minimalist Composer and UCLA Alumnus, Dennis Johnson. "I WAS WALKING DOWN THE HALL on the second floor of the music building at UCLA when I heard someone playing the Webern Variations for Piano. I was surprised that anyone in the UCLA music department knew who Webern was, so I opened the door and there was this young man sitting at the piano. He turned out to be Dennis Johnson." – La Monte Young

Anything but generic, UCLA’s Composing for Visual Media Program, which awarded its first degree in 2008, provides exposure to a broad range of musical styles, as well as what Lefkowitz calls a “focus on fundamentals” — long a hallmark of UCLA’s curriculum.

The 60th GRAMMY Award nominations, announced recently by the Recording Academy, include a handful of UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music faculty, artists-in-residence, staff or alumni, among them Richard Danielpour, Billy Childs, Chris Potter, Daniel Seeff and Randy Newman. Award-winning composer and Professor of Composition Music Richard Danielpour tops the list. He is competing for