Anthony Brandt
Composer; Professor, Shepherd School of Music, Rice University
Anthony Brandt is a composer, professor at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music, and artistic director of contemporary music ensemble Musiqa. He has written chamber operas with librettos by playwrights Will Eno and Neena Beber, as well as works for orchestra, chamber ensembles, dance, theater, film, and television. Compositional honors include a Koussevitzky Commission from the Library of Congress and grants from National Endowment for the Arts, Meet-the-Composer, and Houston Arts Alliance. Brandt’s papers on music cognition have been published in the journals Frontiers and Brain Connectivity. He co-authored The Runaway Species: How Human Creativity Remakes the World, to be published by Catapult (US) and Canongate (UK) in October 2017.
Previously
Our social nature is a major driver of our creativity: We constantly strive to engage and surprise each other, our inventiveness giving us reasons to tune in. Drawing on The R...
Our drive to create makes us unique among living things. What is special about the human brain that enables us to innovate? Why don’t cows choreograph dances? Why don’t alliga...