Dan Asia

Composer and Professor of Music, University of Arizona.

Dan Asia has been an eclectic and unique composer from the start. He recently received a Music Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts Letters, and has received grants from Meet the Composer, a UK Fulbright award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, MacDowell and Tanglewood fellowships, a DAAD Fellowship, Copland Fund grants, the NEA (four times) and Koussevitsky Foundation, the Fromm Foundation, and numerous others. From 1991-1994 he was the Meet The Composer Composer-in-Residence of the Phoenix Symphony, and from 1977-1995 Music Director of the New York-based contemporary ensemble Musical Elements. He has been Professor of Music at the University of Arizona since 1988 and director of the UA Center for American Culture and Ideas since its founding in 2008.

Asia's five symphonies have received wide acclaim from live performance and their international recordings. Under a Barlow Endowment for Music grant, he wrote a work for The Czech Nonet, the longest continuously performing chamber ensemble on the planet. He recently finished the opera, The Tin Angel, after the eponymous book by Paul Pines, his collaborator of over thirty years.

The recorded works of Daniel Asia may be heard on the labels of Summit, New World, and Albany. For further information, visit www.danielasia.net.

Dan Asia's interview was held at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, TX, February 19, 2014.