Chatman, Stephen, 1950- : Born in Faribault, Minnesota, Stephen Chatman studied with Joseph Wood and Walter Aschaffenburg at the Oberlin College Conservatory of Music and with Ross Lee Finney, Leslie Bassett, William Bolcom, and Eugene Kurtz at the University of Michigan where he completed his D.M.A. degree in 1977.
Chatman is recognized internationally as a composer of choral, orchestral, and piano music. His creative output, which includes many large-scale works, is already significant and he has made a particularly important contribution to the choral repertoire. His approximately one hundred choral works have sold more than 500,000 printed copies and are frequently performed. His orchestral works, including commissions from the Vancouver, Toronto, Edmonton, Windsor, and Madison symphonies and the CBC Radio Orchestra, have been performed and recorded by the BBC Symphony Orchestra, Berlin Radio Orchestra, Manitoba Chamber Orchestra, Hong Kong Philharmonic, Sydney, Seoul, San Francisco, St. Louis, Detroit, Dallas, New World, Quebec, Calgary, Winnipeg, Regina, Saskatoon, P.E.I., and Newfoundland symphonies.
Chatman has received many commissions through the Canada Council, the CBC, the British Columbia Arts Council, and the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts, including works for Vancouver New Music, Montreal's Société de musique contemporaine du Québec (SMCQ), the Ottawa International Chamber Music Festival, pianist Marc-André Hamelin, contralto Maureen Forrester; violinist Andrew Dawes, the Vancouver Chamber Choir, the Canadian Children's Opera Chorus and the Banff Centre.
Recorded works include three choral collections performed by the Vancouver Chamber Choir, Due North (Centrediscs), Due East (Centrediscs) and Due West (CBC Records-Centrediscs), mixed ensemble collections, Vancouver Visions (Centrediscs) and Earth Songs (Centrediscs), an orchestral collection, Proud Music of the Storm (Centrediscs), and instrumental recordings on C.R.I., CBC Records, Naxos, Globe, Crystal, Skylark, Arsis, and Frederick Harris Music Celebration Series.
As Professor of composition and of orchestration, co-director of University of British Columbia Contemporary Players new music ensemble, and Head of the UBC School of Music Composition Division, Stephen Chatman has taught a generation of prominent Canadian composers. He has served on many Canada Council juries and national student composition contest juries, and was Jury Chairman of the 2001 CBC National Radio Competition for Young Composers.
The only North American to have won three consecutive BMI Awards to Student Composers (1974-76), Chatman has also received a Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a M.B. Rockefeller Fund Grant, and a U.S. Fulbright Grant for study with Karlheinz Stockhausen at the Hochschule für Musik in Cologne.
In 1988-89, Stephen Chatman became British Columbia's first "composer in residence." In 2003, he was one of three Canadian composers to visit Beijing and Shanghai in the "First Exchange of Canadian and Chinese Composers", sponsored by the Chinese Musicians' Association (CMA) and the Consulate General of the People's Republic of China in Vancouver. He was "composer in residence" with the National Youth Orchestra of Canada in 2004. Also in 2004, he was the first composer ever awarded the Dorothy Somerset Award for Performance and Development in the Visual and Creative Arts from the University of British Columbia. He is also the first Canadian ever short-listed in the BBC Masterprize international competition, for his work Tara's Dream, as well as the winner of other prizes such as the Western Canadian Music Award "Classical Composition of the Year" (2005, 2006, 2010) and the SOCAN Jan V. Matejcek New Classical Music Award (2010, 2012).
Stephen Chatman is an Associate Composer of the Canadian Music Centre, a past President of Vancouver New Music, and a member of the Canadian League of Composers, SOCAN, the Society of Composers, Inc., and the American Music Center. In 2012, he was appointed a Member of the Order of Canada.
