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Performing Arts Library Special Collections in Performing Arts ABA Research Center 
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Ostwald Award Archives
Winner 1998: Dan Welcher, Circular Marches (commission)
Winner 1997: Dan Welcher, Zion
Biography:
Born in Rochester, New York, in 1948, composer-conductor Dan Welcher has been gradually creating a body of compositions in almost every imaginable genre including opera, concerto, symphony, vocal literature, piano solos, and various kinds of chamber music.Welcher first trained as a pianist and bassoonist, earning degrees from the Eastman School of Music and the Manhattan School of Music. He joined the Louisville Orchestra as its Principal Bassoonist in 1972, and remained there until 1978, concurrently teaching composition and theory at the University of Louisville. He joined the Artist Faculty of the Aspen Music Festival in the summer of 1976, teaching bassoon and composition, and has remained on that faculty ever since. He accepted a position on the faculty at the University of Texas in 1978, creating the New Music Ensemble there and serving as Assistant Conductor of the Austin Symphony Orchestra from 1980 to 1990. It was in Texas that his career as a conductor began to flourish, and he has led the premieres of more than 100 new works in a fifteen-year period. After time out for a three-year stint as Composer in Residence for the Honolulu Symphony Orchestra (1990-1993), he is now Professor of Composition at Texas, teaching all levels of composition, orchestration, and directing the New Music Ensemble. He has written fifteen works for orchestra, including two works written in Hawaii: Haleakala: How Maui Snared The Sun for narrator and orchestra, and an ambitious 38-minute Symphony No. 1. More recent works include a Violin Concerto (commissioned and premiered by the Aspen Music Festival in 1993 to celebrate Dorothy DeLay's 75th birthday), a Piano Concerto (commissioned and premiered by James Dick and the Round Top Festival in 1994), and a second symphony (titled Night Watchers) commissioned by the Flagstaff Symphony, in honor of the 100th anniversary of the City of Flagstaff, Arizona. His Bright Wings: Valediction For Large Orchestra, was commissioned by the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, and was premiered by that orchestra under its Music Director Andrew Litton in March 1997.
Dan Welcher has won numerous awards and prizes from institutions such as the Guggenheim Foundation (a Fellowship in 1997), National Endowment for the Arts, The Reader's Digest/Lila Wallace Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, The Bellagio Center, the American Music Center, and ASCAP. His orchestral music has been performed by more than fifty orchestras, including the Chicago Symphony, the Atlanta Symphony, and the BBC Symphony, and a sizable number of his works are commercially recorded. He has served on the Board of Directors of Chamber Music America and has been a member of ASCAP since 1971. Welcher lives in Bastrop, Texas with his wife, writer Ann McCutchan.
Source: Biography at Theodore Presser Co. Internet site.
