Dennis DeSantis

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Dennis DeSantis

Dennis DeSantis has his own home page. Here it is: http://www.minimumsecurity.org/desantis/.

Dennis DeSantis (b. 1973) has studied composition at Western Michigan University (B.M. '97, Magna Cum Laude) and Yale University (M.M. '99), and is currently pursuing a Doctor Of Musical Arts degree at the Eastman School of Music. His principal composition teachers have included Ramon Zupko, Curtis Curtis-Smith, Jim Schwall, Evan Ziporyn, Martin Bresnick, Ned Rorem, Ezra Laderman, and Christopher Rouse. He has also studied percussion with Judy Moonert, Billy Hart, and John Beck.

DeSantis' works have been performed throughout the United States and Canada, with notable performances at the Norfolk and Bowdoin summer music festivals, June in Buffalo, and the Festival at Sandpoint. Since 1996, he has been the Composer-in-Residence for Collegium Novum (Anne Decker, artistic director), a contemporary music ensemble currently based in Vermont.

In 1999, DeSantis received an ASCAP Foundation Morton Gould Young Composer Award for his work Brownian Motion. He has also received awards from the Theodore Presser Foundation, the Utah Composer's Guild, the American Guild of Music, Austin Peay Young Composers Competition, Yale, and Western Michigan University.

As a percussionist, he has performed with such artists as Evan Ziporyn, John Halle, Jack Vees, Dan Grabois, and Steve Houghton, and has recorded extensively as both a classical and drumset player. He has also written and recorded string arrangements for the pop groups Knee Deep Shag and Liquid Brick.

Recent collaborations include a big band arrangement of Conlon Nancarrow's Study #11 (with Evan Ziporyn), an ongoing series of techno works (with Ann Arbor based electronica artist Spesimen), and a modern ballet adaptation of Romeo and Juliet (with choreographer Sharon Garber.)

Dennis currently resides in Rochester, New York.