Dan Dediu was born in 1967 in Braila, Romania. He earned his undergraduate degree in composition at the Academy of Music in Bucharest and attended post-graduate courses at HMdK in Vienna; he later earned his PhD at the National University of Music in Bucharest. Dediu was awarded scholarships and fellowships by the Alfred-Toepfer Foundation, Hamburg; Alban-Berg Foundation, Vienna; New Europe College, Bucharest; Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin; Zuger Kulturstiftung Landis & Gyr, Switzerland, Bavarian Ministry for Culture, Germany. Among his teachers were composers Ștefan Niculescu, Dan Constantinescu and Francis Burt. He was invited for the Summer Workshop in Computing for Composers, IRCAM, Paris in 1994.
In addition to his work as a composer, Dediu has served on six occasions as artistic director of the International Week of New Music in Bucharest, a major festival showcasing new works. Since 2003, he has also led Profil-Sinfonietta Bucharest. He has taught composition at the National University of Music, Bucharest, since 1999, where he has served as the department chair since 2000 and as elected rector since 2008. In 2017, under the auspices of the Enescu Festival in Bucharest, Dediu initiated and moderated the International Forum of Composers, a prestigious meeting of contemporary music composers from all over the world.
Among his many awards are first prizes in a national competition in Cluj-Napoca (1986, 1988), in a competition for chamber music with brass in Budapest and Barcs (1990), and in the competition of the Orchestre Français de Flûtes (2000, for Spaimă, Op. 86). Other honors include the Premiul George Enescu, the Prize at Expo 2000 in Hannover from the Romanian Development Agency (2000), the Prize of the competition of the Galliard Ensemble in London (2000), Erster Preis in the competition of the Neuköllner Oper in Berlin (2002), and the cultural prize Prometheus-Opera Prima in Romania (2002). His more than 160 works are performed worldwide and produced as recordings by Albany Records, Cavalli, NEOS and Casa Radio.
He joins us at the Cabrillo Festival for his first time for the U.S. premiere of Grana on Opening Night, during Aural Histories, Friday, August 3.
