Ron Fein – Biography
Ron Fein has toured internationally with his music installation works, to critical acclaim. He has lived and created new work in Paris at the CCMIX studios, one of the foremost music composition and research facilities, begun by composer Iannis Xenakis. He is Director emeritus of the Washington Composers Forum in Seattle, where he worked extensively to support the creations of Northwest and international composers, and was a featured lecturer for the Seattle Symphony and the University of Washington. As a journalist he has written music commentary for the Washington Post, Library of Congress and Independent Journal. His work in this area has chronicled many significant world premieres, radio broadcasts, and the advocacy of contemporary music.
He has devoted much of his creative life to what he has termed the noncooperative ensemble. He introduced this work in 1986 with the issue of the album “Music for Noncooperative Ensembles” on the Euphonic label, featuring instrumentalists of the San Francisco Symphony and soprano Judith Bettina. This music reflects the way that sound occurs in the natural world, by obscuring verticality yet maintaining strong compositional structure.
Formal musical studies in composition and theory were done at California Institute of the Arts, Dominican College, San Francisco State University, and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. His teachers have been Morton Subotnik, Earle Brown, Jules Langert, Leonard Stein and William Hibbard.
Ron’s music has been performed by the Kronos Quartet, Gregg Smith Singers, San Francisco Opera, New Performance Group, and many others, with grants and awards from Carnegie Hall with Pierre Boulez, National Public Radio, Artist Trust, Meet the Composer, Yaddo, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Banff Centre, Les Atelier UPIC through an award from the French Ministry of Culture, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, among many others.
His albums are available on major streaming sites, featuring the composer as creator, performer and digital engineer. Multiple pianos, jazz, percussion ensembles, world music, nature, the modern troubadour and electronics are explored through exhaustive process in which all aspects of performance, composition and digital editing are controlled and produced by the composer.
Ron writes music in a studio/horse barn in Sebastopol California, and in the Mojave desert at his solar recording studio, in great solitude. He is also a seasoned flamenco guitarist and cantaor and has wandered through Spain and the gypsy world in pursuit of this art form.
