Richard Campanelli

Richard Campanelli was born in Hartford CT. When he was seven years old the family moved to Springfield, MO. There were not a lot of opportunities for an artistic education of any sort there, but he was able to finally talk his parents into getting a piano and started taking lessons from local piano teachers. As a youth he was fascinated by the piano sonatas of Beethoven, and wanted to be a composer from a fairly early age. It wasn’t until he attended that Conservatory of Music in Kansas City that he finally was able to explore that possibility. He graduated with a BMA in composition. He then attended the Hartt Conservatory of Music in Hartford, Ct, where he studied with Donald Harris. During the following summer he was a Nikos Skalkottas Tanglewood Fellow where he studied with George Perle.

Richard completed his academic musical education by receiving a DMA from the University of MI where he studied with Leslie Bassett and William Bolcom. Some of the awards he has won include the Holtkamp Prize for new organ music, a Ludwig Vogelstein grant, yearly ASCAP awards, a Marimolin prize for a new work for violin and marimba, a Charles Ives Scholarship and a Goddard Lieberson Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts & Letters and several Michigan Council for the Arts grants. Richard currently lives in Ann Arbor, MI and is working on a piano concerto.