bio
SHULAMIT RAN has been awarded most major honors given to composers in the U.S., including the 1991 Pulitzer Prize for her Symphony. Her music has been performed worldwide by leading instrumental and vocal ensembles including the Chicago Symphony, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Israel Philharmonic, the New York Philharmonic, the American Composers Orchestra, the Mendelssohn, Brentano, Pacifica, Daedalus, Spektral, and Juilliard Quartets, Chanticleer, and Ars Nova Copenhagen, to name a few. Between 1990 and 1997 she served as Composer-in-Residence for Daniel Barenboim with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and with the Lyric Opera of Chicago in 1994-1997, where her residency culminated in the performance of her first opera Between Two Worlds (the Dybbuk). Maestros Daniel Barenboim, Pierre Boulez, Christoph Von Dohnanyi, Gustavo Dudamel, Zubin Mehta, Marin Alsop, Yehudi Menhuin, and various others have conducted her works. The recipient of five honorary degrees, she is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Ran is the Andrew MacLeish Distinguished Service Professor Emerita at the University of Chicago where she was faculty member in 1973-2015. Her Anne Frank, a full-scale opera on a libretto by Charles Kondek, was commissioned and premiered in March 2023 by the Indiana University Opera and Ballet Theater at the Jacob School of Music with Arthur Fagen, conductor, and Crystal Manich, stage director.
Among her cello compositions are Three Fantasy Pieces for cello and piano, Fantasy Variations for cello solo, and her much performed Lyre of Orpheus, a string sextet with the first cello in the lead role.