Marti Epstein Image

Image by Michael D Spencer

Marti Epstein

Professor
Affiliated Departments
Berklee Online
Composition
Composition
classical music
mepstein@berklee.edu
Telephone
617-747-8167
Personal Websites
Marti Epstein's Website

For media inquiries, please contact Media Relations

Marti Epstein is a Boston-based composer whose music has been performed by the San Francisco Symphony, The Radio Symphony Orchestra of Frankfurt, Ensemble Modern, Trinity Church Wall Street, and the Boston Symphony Chamber Players. She has completed commissions for the Fromm Foundation, the Munich Biennale, the Ludovico Ensemble, Guerilla Opera, Radius Ensemble, Tanglewood Music Center, Winsor Music, Boston Opera Collaborative, the Callithumpian Consort, Hinge Ensemble, loadbang, and Collage New Music.

Epstein was a two-time fellow at the Tanglewood Music Center (1986 and 1988) and a three-time fellow at the MacDowell Colony (1998, 1999, 2022).

In 2020, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to compose "Seven Sisters, Radiant Sisters" for the Hinge Ensemble, "Alpenglow" for loadbang, and "In Praise of Broken Clocks" for SoundIcon. Nebraska Impromptu, an album of Epstein's chamber music for clarinet, was released this past April with New Focus Recordings and features clarinetist Rane Moore and members of Winsor Music. She is a professor of composition at Berklee College of Music/Boston Conservatory at Berklee.

Career Highlights
  • Composer with numerous international commissions
  • Recordings include Albion Moonlight by Atlantic Brass, The Five Chairs by the University of Iowa Brass Quintet, and Waterbowls by Kathleen Supové
  • Orchestral work: "Celestial Navigation" premiered by the San Francisco Symphony, "Print" premiered by the Radio Sinfonie Orchestra of Frankfurt, and "Twylle" commissioned and premiered by the Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra
  • Past residencies at the MacDowell Colony
  • Recipient of Fromm Foundation 1998 commission
  • Hypnagogia, a CD of her chamber works, recorded and performed by the Ludovico Ensemble
Awards
  • Guggenheim Fellow (2020)
Education
  • Boston University
    Massachusetts
    Doctor of Musical Arts (DMA)
    Composition
In Their Own Words

There's a misconception about our department that because we teach the core courses, we're sort of old-fashioned, and we're not. In some ways, we're even more adventurous than people in some of the other departments.

I would say that the composition students here are not composing jazz. Specifically, they're not composing commercial music. They're not composing jingles. They may be composing film music because we have a lot of dual majors. They're usually composing music that's artistically interesting and specifically for the concert hall.

I think we do a better job of teaching concert music here than at other, more conventional music schools. Not only are the students here exposed to the whole classical canon—they're exposed to all different contemporary styles: jazz and all different kinds of pop styles and everything. So, in a way, they're getting a broader education.

To graduate, students have to have a portfolio of pieces, and—very important—they have to have a certain number of these pieces performed because one of the aspects of a composer's training is, how do you get people to play your music?

The number one thing I do is to try to get students to hear everything they write. In my Techniques of Tonal Writing (CM-221) class, students are always writing for piano, and I spend a very substantial part of the class playing their pieces for them. Because I don't think you can compose in a vacuum. You have to be listening to what you're writing all the time. The feedback from me as a performer is invaluable because I can say, 'Well, this isn't playable in this situation because of this,' whereas if they're just sitting and sequencing what they're writing, they don't know what a human can and can't do.

You have to develop really good writing skills before the technology will work for you in the way it's supposed to. And live performance, the human element, is so intangible but so necessary and so exciting.