VA - Marty Regan: Lost Mountains, Quiet Valleys - Selected Works for Japanese Instruments, Vol. 4 (2021)

Marty Regan is a composer whose creative activities are focused on expanding and developing the repertoire of contemporary music for traditional Japanese and Asian instruments and creating music that explores cross-cultural exchange. He has composed over 75 works for traditional Japanese instruments and since 2002 has been affiliated with AURA-J, one of the premiere contemporary-traditional Japanese music ensembles. He has been commissioned by prominent chamber ensembles such as the Apollo Chamber Players, Aperio, and Duo YUMENO and various international music festivals. His music has been performed in venues such as The Kennedy Center, the Asia Society Texas Center, the Wortham Center, The National Opera Center, the Mabel Dodge Luhan House, Osaka Philharmonic Hall, and the San Antonio Museum of Art. Regan’s translation of Minoru Miki’s Composing for Japanese Instruments, published by the University of Rochester Press in 2008, is widely regarded as the authoritative source on the subject and the only resource of its kind available in English. Volume Nos.1-3 of his Selected Works for Japanese Instruments are available on Navona Records and his music is published by the Mother Earth Co., Ltd. In 2011 he was affiliated as a research scholar at Shanghai Conservatory of Music, where he took applied lessons on traditional Chinese instruments. He also studied traditional Korean Music at the National Gugak Center and Balinese Gamelan at the Cudamani Summer Institute. He completed his Ph.D. in music with an emphasis in composition at the University of Hawai'i, Manoa in 2006. His music has been broadcast on American Public Media’s Performance Today and NHK’s Hōgaku no hito toki / 'A Moment for Traditional Japanese Music. One of his largest works, a chamber opera entitled The Memory Stone, was commissioned by the Houston Grand Opera as part of the HGOco's Songs of Houston: East+West initiative and was premiered in 2013 at the Asia Society Texas Center. In 2015 he was the recipient of a Helene Wurlitzer Foundation Artist Residency Grant as well as a Clare Hall Visiting Research Fellowship from the University of Cambridge, UK. He is an Associate Professor of Music at Texas A&M University.