Brandon Derfler
FULL-TIME FacultyAssociate Professor
Music
Phone: 801.832.2441
Email: bderfler@westminsteru.edu
Office Location: Jewett Center EEJ-H
Office Hours: M/W 11:30–2:00 p.m.
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 University. 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. Dr, Derfler has served as the Director of the Westminster Chamber Orchestra from 2012-2014 and again from 2018 to the present. In the last four years he has grown this hybrid university/community orchestra from 21 to 67 players while programming challenging and intriguing repertoire. An advocate of new music and the 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, Bear McCreary, Linda Robbins Coleman, María Huld Markan Sigfúsdóttir, Astor Piazzolla, Caroline Shaw, 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, with performances of his Serendipity for clarinet and percussion and an arrangement of music by Chopin among recent premieres. 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
