Anthony Brandt

Composer Anthony Brandt is a Professor at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music and co-founder and Artistic Director of Musiqa, winner of two Adventurous Programming Awards from Chamber Music America and ASCAP. His catalogue includes orchestral, chamber, vocal, theater, dance and television scores, installation pieces and two chamber operas. Recordings of his music are available on the Albany and Crystal labels. His honors include a Koussevitzky Commission from the Library of Congress, grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Meet-the-Composer, and the Houston Arts Alliance, and fellowships to the MacDowell and Djerassi arts colonies. He has been a visiting composer at the Bremen Musikfest, the Universidad Veracruzana, the Bowdoin International Music Festival, the Baltimore New Chamber Festival, Cleveland State University and SUNY-Buffalo, and composer-in-residence of the International Festival of Music in Morelia, Mexico and Houston’s OrchestraX. Dr. Brandt and neuroscientist David Eagleman have co-authored "The Runaway Species: How Creativity Remakes the World." The book is the official selection for the 2018 Common Reading Experience at Texas State University and is being published in ten countries. It is the basis for the upcoming documentary "The Creative Brain," hosted by Dr. Eagleman. Dr. Brandt has also co-authored articles for the journals Frontiers and Brain Connectivity and an upcoming chapter in the "Oxford Handbook of Music Psychology." With Musiqa, he presents inter-disciplinary public concerts and free educational programming that have served over 50,000 public school students and teachers. At Rice, Dr. Brandt has organized three international conferences on “Exploring the Mind through Music” and been awarded the University’s George R. Brown and Phi Beta Kappa Teaching prizes.