Biography

The music of Benjamin Beckman (b. 2000) searches for meaning through the manipulation of sonic materials to reflect natural, textual, spiritual, sociological, metaphysical, and abstract processes. Heralded as a composer with a “strong compositional voice” (The Guardian), “uncommon maturity” and one who “stands his own alongside master orchestrators” (bachtrack), Beckman is at home creating an hour-long solo piano piece that an audience “felt as though the experience had been a musical hallucinogenic” (Yale Herald), composing orchestral work showcasing “kaleidoscopic fractals” and “fragmented fanfares” (Opera Today), and writing chamber opera that is “timeless and clear” concerned with “emotive beauty that is both accessible and engaging” (Yale Daily News).

Beckman’s orchestral music has been performed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the National Youth Orchestra of the United States of America, the Yale Symphony Orchestra and the Yale Undergraduate Chamber Orchestra, the Kaleidoscope Chamber Orchestra, and the Boston University Tanglewood Institute Young Artists Orchestra, led by conductors such as Antonio Pappano, Ken-David Masur, Ruth Reinhardt, and William Boughton. Other collaborations include those with the Long Beach Opera, Opera Elect, Salastina, Frost School of Music Ensemble Ibis, Triton Brass, the Lyris Quartet, and the Thornton Edge. His music has been presented on the BBC Proms, the Tanglewood Music Festival, Concertgebouw Presents: Summer Concerts, the HearNow Festival, the Hot Air Festival, NPR’s From the Top, YoungArts Los Angeles, and Yale College New Music. His 2023 opera Passage, with librettist Adam Haliburton, was the first-ever evening-length opera to be premiered by the Opera Theatre of Yale College and was awarded Yale’s Beekman Cannon Friends of Music Prize for most outstanding senior thesis in the music major.

His compositions have been recognized by both the ASCAP Foundation Morton Gould and Herb Alpert Awards, the New York Youth Symphony’s First Music commissioning program, the American Composers Forum Nextnotes Awards, the National YoungArts Foundation, and composition competitions sponsored by the Philadelphia Organ Festival, the University of Miami, the University of Kentucky, the Metropolitan Youth Symphony Orchestra, Opera Elect, and the Boston New Music Initiative.

Beckman is currently pursuing a master’s degree in composition at the USC Thornton School of Music, where he studies with Andrew Norman, Veronika Krausas, and Donald Crockett, and holds a teaching assistantship managing and playing in the university’s contemporary music ensemble, Thornton Edge. He holds an undergraduate degree in music from Yale, where he studied with Konrad Kaczmarek, Kathryn Alexander, and Richard Lalli, conducted the Yale Undergraduate Chamber Orchestra and the Opera Theatre of Yale College, and was awarded the Abraham Beekman Cox Prize, Joseph Selden Memorial Award, and the R.J.R. Cohen Fellowship. Beckman is also an alumnus of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Composer Fellowship Program, the Salastina Sounds Promising Composer Program, and summer festivals including the Norfolk New Music Workshop, the Zodiac Festival, the fresh inc. festival, the National Youth Orchestra of the USA Composer Apprenticeship, the Boston University Tanglewood Institute, and Interlochen.

Beyond composition, Beckman is also adept as a conductor and repetiteur. He has accompanied productions of Carmen, Luisa Miller, Lucia di Lammermoor (Sarasota Opera), Rusalka, Salieri’s La scuola de’ gelosi (Pacific Opera Project), La fille du régiment, La scala di seta (Opera Company of Middlebury), The Turn of the Screw (Chicago Summer Opera), Mozart’s La finta gardiniera and Rorem’s Our Town (USC Thornton Opera), L’Orfeo, Doriclea (Yale Baroque Opera Project), and Vaughan Williams’s Riders to the Sea (Opera Theater of Yale College). He is the Artistic Director of Park City Opera, a local and independent opera company serving Park City, UT, which he co-founded alongside longtime friends and collaborators Lena Goldstein and Lisl Wangermann.