Marty Regan

Marty Regan (b. 1972) has composed over 60 works for traditional Japanese instruments and since 2002 has been affiliated with AURA-J, one of Japan's premiere performance ensembles of contemporary-traditional Japanese music. He graduated from Oberlin College in 1995 with a B.M. in Composition and a B.A. in English and East Asian Studies. From 2000 to 2002 he studied composition and took applied lessons on traditional Japanese instruments as a Japanese government-sponsored research student at Tokyo College of Music. In 2002, his composition Song-Poem of the Eastern Clouds (2001) for shakuhachi and 21-string koto was premiered at the 5th Annual Composition Competition for Traditional Japanese Instruments at the National Theatre of Japan. He completed his Ph.D. in Music with an emphasis in Composition at the University of Hawai‘i, Manoa in 2006. His works for Japanese instruments riverrun (2003), Light of the Rainbow (2003), dragoneyes (2004), wildfire (2005), Maqam (2008), Evanescent Yearning...(2008), Shadows of the Moon (2008), 21-String Koto Concerto No. 2: “Love” (2009), In the Night Sky (2010), and Shadows of the Flames (2011) have been recorded and released on various record labels in Japan. His English translation of Minoru Miki’s orchestration manual, Composing for Japanese Instruments was published in 2008 by the University of Rochester Press. In 2010, Navona Records released. a compact disc of his works entitled "Marty Regan's Selected Works for Japanese Instruments, Vol. 1: Forest Whispers..." The second volume in the Selected Works for Japanese Instruments series, subtitled Magic Mirror, was released in 2012 by the same label. In 2011 he was affiliated as a research scholar at Shanghai Conservatory of Music, where he took applied lessons on traditional Chinese instruments. His newest work, a chamber opera entitled "The Memory Stone," was commissioned by the Houston Grand Opera as part of the HGCOco's Songs of Houston: East + West initiative and was premiered in April 2013 at the Asia Society Texas Center. He is an Associate Professor of Music at Texas A&M University.