"Martin Bresnick has been thriving as a teacher at the Yale School of Music, inspiring the students who work with him and writing a large, diverse roster of works that are admired by performers across America...music that seems at once ancient, elegiac and awesomely new...Listen and you will hear."

- Anthony Tommasini (New York Times)


Martin Bresnick's compositions, from opera, chamber and symphonic music to film scores and computer music, are performed throughout the world. Bresnick delights in reconciling the seemingly irreconcilable, bringing together repetitive gestures derived from minimalism with a harmonic palette that encompasses both highly chromatic sounds and more open, consonant harmonies and a raw power reminiscent of rock. At times his musical ideas spring from hardscrabble sources, often with a very real political import. But his compositions never descend into agitprop; one gains their meaning by the way the music itself unfolds, and always on its own terms.

Besides having received many prizes and commissions, the first Charles Ives Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, The Rome Prize, The Berlin Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Koussevitzky Commission, among many others, Martin Bresnick is also recognized as an influential teacher of composition. Students from every part of the globe and of virtually every musical inclination have been inspired by his critical encouragement.

Martin Bresnick's compositions are published by Carl Fischer Music Publishers, New York; Bote & Bock, Berlin; CommonMuse Music Publishers, New Haven; and have been recorded by Cantaloupe Records, New World Records, Albany Records, Bridge Records, Composers Recordings Incorporated, Centaur, Starkland Records and Artifact Music.

"Like Blake, Bresnick draws on the most fundamental materials of life and art to produce a complex new mythology."

-Matthew Lorenzon

"Bresnick has been indispensable as a teacher to the current generation of new composers, and his own music is sublime, with exquisite craft, an ear and heart for the beautiful, and a transparent, graceful and unselfconscious connection to the common musical materials all around us."

- George Grella

"one of the great voices of his generation."

- Robert Carl (Fanfare)

"unexpected synergies, a fragile beauty and sensibility that takes it out of our time and places it somewhere in an unknown exotic locale at a time unknown."

- Grego Applegate Edwards (Classical-Modern Music Review)

"...music that is lit from within by a literate and indomitable humanism."

- The New Yorker

"Bresnick, radical in his commitment to freedom..."

- Javier Palacio