Roger Bourland

Roger Bourland (b. December 13, 1952, Evanston IL) received his education from the University of Wisconsin/Madison (B.Mus.),the New England Conservatory of Music (M.M.), and Harvard University (A.M., Ph.D.). His teachers have included Leon Kirchner, Gunther Schuller, Donald Martino, John Harbison, and Randall Thompson. He received the Koussevitzky Prize in Composition at Tanglewood, the John Knowles Paine Fellowship at Harvard, two ASCAP Grants to Young Composers, numerous Meet the Composers grants, and was a co-founder of the Boston-based consortium Composers in Red Sneakers. Bourland has composed over one hundred works for all media: solo, instrumental, chamber, vocal and choral music, electro-acoustic music, and music for orchestra, wind ensemble, and other large ensembles, which are published by Yelton Rhodes Music, ECS Publishing, Dorn Publications, Inc. and Associated Music Publishers, Inc. His works are recorded on Navona Records, Naxos, Northeastern Records, 1750 Arch, OpenLoop, Cambria, and GM Recordings. In 1993, Bourland established Yelton Rhodes Music, a publishing house for vocal and choral music.

Since 1983, Professor Bourland has taught composition, music theory, orchestration, electronic music, and other classes and seminars in the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music. As an administrator at UCLA, Bourland has served as the Chair of the Committee on Committees (1997-98, and 2001 – 2003), the Chair of the Faculty Executive Committee in the Arts (5 years), Chair of the Composition program (15 years), as the President of the UCLA Faculty Center (2004-2005), and as Chair of the Department of Music (2007-2011). Dr. Bourland was awarded the UCLA Distinguished Teaching Award for 2005-6. In June 2013 Bourland will retire from UCLA to focus on composing.

Since 2007 Bourland’s blog, rogerbourland.com, has been ranked among the top 50 classical blogs.

Bourland is currently (2012) finishing an opera with a libretto by Mitchell Morris entitled The Dove and the Nightingale scheduled for premieres at UCLA and at the Angela Peralta Theater in Mazatlán in 2013-14.