Joseph Landers

Joseph Landers was born in Birmingham, Alabama in 1965. He studied with Frederic Goossen at the University of Alabama, Lothar Klein at the University of Toronto, and Alexander Goehr at Cambridge.

Landers has been awarded fellowships by the Fulbright Foundation, the Tanglewood Music Center, the American Music Center, and the MacDowell Colony, where he was selected as the Margaret Lee Crofts Fellow in Composition for 1995-96. His orchestral work Karangan was selected as a finalist for the 1999 Alexander Zemlinsky International Prize for Composition. In 2000 he was awarded the Thor Johnson Memorial Commission for his Trio for Violin, Horn and Piano.

The works of Joseph Landers have been featured on concerts series and festivals across the U. S. and abroad including the Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music, the AD*Evantgard Festival in Munich, the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival (U.K.), and the Gaudeamus Music Week (Holland), where his orchestral work Nine forty-eight was selected as a finalist for the 1997 prize in composition. Recent performances include the European premiere of Nocturne in Blue and Green at Wigmore Hall in London, the world premiere of Some Melodious Sonnet at Princeton University, and a recital by Korean oboist Seok Yoo-ri given at the Seoul Arts Center that featured Late Summer Arioso.

His compositions for orchestra have been performed by the Alabama Symphony, the Florida Orchestra, the Netherlands Radio Orchestra, the Omaha Symphony, the Tuscaloosa Symphony,  and various other orchestras under conductors including Christopher Confessore, Jahja Ling, Ransom Wilson, Bruce Hangen, Adrian Gnam, and Jac Van Steen. Landers has also appeared as guest conductor in the performance of several of his orchestra works, including Istanpita with the Lincoln Symphony, Concerto for Oboe and Orchestra with the Newburgh Symphony and Richard Killmer as soloist, and Concerto for Four Horns and Orchestra with the Alabama Symphony and the TransAtlantic Horn Quartet as soloists. His music is regularly performed by internationally acclaimed musicians including Lucy Shelton, Mariko Anraku, Eleonore Pameijer and Marcel Worms.