Anthony Iannaccone

Anthony Iannaccone is a contemporary American composer of chamber, orchestral, and choral music. He is also in high demand as a guest conductor, and a respected music educator. He was born in 1943 in Brooklyn and showed an aptitude for music at a very young age. In his childhood and early teenage years, he studied the violin and piano, and in the summers, he enjoyed fishing with his cousins off the South Shore of Long Island. He began composition lessons with Aaron Copland when he was 16 years old, and he composed his first pieces, such as Parodies for woodwind quintet from 1958 and the Piano Trio from 1959. In 1961, Iannaccone enrolled at the Manhattan School of Music, where he studied with David Diamond, Vittorio Giannini, and Ludmila Ulehla, and he remained a student of Copland until 1964. He composed his first two symphonies in 1965 and 1966, and he worked as an orchestral violinist. He also taught part-time at the Manhattan School of Music while he worked on his master’s degree there from 1966 to 1968. He completed his music education at the Eastman School of Music, where he studied with Samuel Adler and earned his PhD in 1971. That same year, he moved to Michigan and began a long appointment as a professor of composition at Eastern Michigan University. After two years, he founded an electronic music studio, and he became the conductor of the EMU Collegium Musicum early music ensemble. In the 1980s, he composed several critically acclaimed works, including the Divertimento for Orchestra, Walt Whitman Song, and A Whitman Madrigal. He was also awarded first prize from the National Band Association for Apparitions in 1988. In 1990, his Two-Piano Inventions won the SAT/CF Peters Competition. Other important works of his from the 1990s include Night Rivers, Symphony No. 3, and Waiting for Sunrise on the Sound. As a guest conductor, he has worked with European ensembles such as the Bohuslav Martinu Philharmonic, the Moravian Philharmonic, and the Slovak Radio Orchestra. In 2003, Iannaccone composed the Clarinet Quintet, which was commissioned for clarinetist Richard Stoltzman. Although he retired from EMU in 2013, he has remained active as a composer. His music was featured in the 2023 album Looking Back, Moving On, including the premier recording of Bridges, Symphony No. 4, which was commissioned for the Florida State University Orchestra.
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