Brandon Derfler

Brandon Derfler

Full-Time Faculty
Associate Professor
Music

Phone: 801.832.2441

Email: bderfler@westminsteru.edu

Office Location: Jewett Center EEJ-H

Office Hours: TTh 01:30PM 04:00PM

Degrees

Ph.D. University of Washington
M.A. Univ North Carolina Chapel Hl
B.A. University of Utah

About

Brandon Derfler is an Associate Professor in the Florence J. Gillmor School of Music at Westminster College. He holds degrees from the University of Utah (B.A. in Music), the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (M.A. in Musicology) and the University of Washington (PhD in Music Theory). He has served as Managing Editor of the journal Perspectives of New Music. His scholarly work has been published in GAMUT Journal, Indiana Theory Review, and Perspectives of New Music and in a book, Single-Voice Transformations: A Model for Parsimonious Voice Leading, published by Cambridge Scholars. An advocate of new music and for music of underrepresented composers, Dr. Derfler has conducted the Utah premieres of works by John Cage, Ludovico Einaudi, Louise Farrenc, Jocelyn Morlock, Jonathan Peters, Howard Shore, and Alvin Singleton with the Westminster Chamber Orchestra, and Philip Glass’s The Photographer with the Westminster Opera Studio. He studied composition with Steve Roens and Bruce Reich in the early ‘90s and is just now returning to music composition in earnest. His orchestration of music by Chopin will receive a world premiere later this month and he is currently at work on a piece for chamber orchestra. Outside of academia, Dr. Derfler enjoys hiking and backpacking in the canyon country of southern Utah and dissecting the minutiae of J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-Earth.

Areas of Expertise

Music Theory, Music History, Orchestral Conducting, Music Composition, and Piano