Shulamit Ran’s music has been praised as “gloriously human”; “compelling not only for its white-hot emotional content but for its intelligence and compositional clarity”; and “she has written with the same sense of humanity found in Mozart’s most profound opera arias or Mahler’s searching symphonies.”
Shulamit began composing songs to Hebrew poetry at the age of seven in her native Israel. By nine she was studying composition and piano with some of Israel’s most noted musicians, and within several years was having her early works performed by professional musicians, as well as orchestras. She continued her studies in the U.S., on scholarships form the Mannes College of Music and the America Israel Cultural Foundation. Winner of the 1991 Pulitzer Prize in music for her Symphony, she has been awarded most major honors given to composers in the U.S., including two fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, grants and commissions from the Koussevitzky Foundation at the Library of Congress, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fromm Music Foundation, Chamber Music America, the American Academy and Institute for Arts and Letters, first prize in the Kennedy Center-Friedheim Awards competition for orchestral music, and many more.
Shulamit, who is now the Andrew MacLeish Distinguished Service Professor Emerita at the University of Chicago Department of Music where she taught since 1973, lists her late colleague and friend Ralph Shapey, with whom she also studied in 1977, as an important mentor.
Her music has been performed worldwide by leading ensembles including the Chicago Symphony, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Israel Philharmonic, the New York Philharmonic, the American Composers Orchestra, the Mendelssohn, Brentano, Pacifica, Juilliard, and Spektral Quartets, Chanticleer, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and many others. Maestros Daniel Barenboim, Pierre Boulez, Christoph von Dohnányi, Gustavo Dudamel, Zubin Mehta, Yehudi Menhuin, Gary Bertini, Arthur Fagen, Marin Alsop, David Shallon, Catherine Comet, and others have conducted her works. She served as Composer-in-Residence with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra between 1990 and 1997, and with the Lyric Opera of Chicago in 1994-1997 where her residency culminated in the premiere of her first opera Between Two Worlds (the Dybbuk).
The recipient of five honorary degrees, she is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Among her numerous residencies were those at the American Academy in Rome and in festivals such as the Tanglewood Music Center, the Aspen Institute, the Marlboro Festival, Yellow Barn, the Steans Institute at the Ravinia Festival, Composers Conference, and many more. Her second opera Anne Frank, a full-scale opera on a libretto by Charles Kondek, was commissioned and premiered in 2023 by the Indiana University Opera and Ballet Theater at the Jacobs School of Music with Arthur Fagen, conductor, and Crystal Manich, stage director.
Shulamit Ran’s works are published by Theodore Presser Company and the Israeli Music Institute, with selected choral music published by G. Schirmer and Hal Leonard. Recordings of her music have been released on numerous labels, including Albany, Angel, Bridge, Cedille, Centaur, CRI, Erato, Innova, Koch International Classics, New World, Vox, Warner Classics, and more.
For more information see shulamitran.com