Album Notes

Award-winning American composer Randolph L. Partain has received performances of his works on both sides of the Atlantic. He has been commissioned by some of the country’s most accomplished performers, who have called his music “well thought-out and always interesting,” “fun and exciting to perform,” and “intelligently written.”

Partain's music has been programmed on numerous contemporary music festivals throughout the past decade, and he has received multiple awards from ASCAP. During November of 2007, he was The Jean and Louis Dreyfus Foundation Fellow at the Millay Colony for the Arts at Steepletop in Austerlitz, New York, where he completed Pilgrimage, a commission for the Tremont String Quartet. Partain won the 2006 International Society of Bassists/David Walter Composition Competition, Chamber Division, for his work Kelevsma (clarinet, harp, and double bass).

His Three Simple Talismans for Piano was chosen as a semi-finalist in the Renée B. Fisher Composer Awards for 2006–2007, and his orchestral work Blood Rite was a finalist in the Columbia Orchestra American Composer Competition for 2007. During the summer of 2004, Partain’s song cycle Pax Americana: Songs of Protest received its European premiere in a public concert at the Antonin Dvorak Museum in Prague during his participation in the Czech-American Summer Music Institute’s Eleventh Annual Summer Program in Composition, directed by Ladislav Kubik.

Partain studied piano and composition at Florida Southern College, where his naked and fiery forms for wind ensemble was the first student composition ever presented on the college’s Festival of Fine Arts concert series. In May of 2005, he graduated summa cum laude with a Doctoral degree in Music Composition from Rice University, under the tutelage of Karim Al-Zand and Arthur Gottschalk.

While in Houston, Partain has taught a variety of undergraduate music courses at Rice University, Houston Community College, and Sam Houston State University. He is currently employed as Director of Worship and the Arts at Lord of Life Lutheran Church, and he continues to accompany, arrange, and compose.