photo: Laurie Beck

            Thomas Whitman (b. 1960) began his musical studies with cellist Harry Wimmer.  His first composition teachers were Gerald Levinson, Thomas Oboe Lee, and Joan Panetti at Swarthmore College and Max Lifchitz of Columbia University.  He subsequently earned a Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania, where his teachers included George Crumb, Jay Reise, and Richard Wernick.  As a Luce Scholar, he studied traditional music in Bali, Indonesia in 1986-7 where his principal teachers were the late I Madé Gerindem and I Wayan Rai.  He is also an accomplished viola da gambist.

Mr. Whitman has taught at Swarthmore College since 1990. He is the founder and co-director of Gamelan Semara Santi, the Philadelphia area’s only Balinese percussion orchestra,  which performed with the Philadelphia Orchestra in October 2003 at the Kimmel Center in Philadelphia and at Carnegie Hall. He also directs the Chester Children’s Gamelan, a volunteer effort that introduces the rich traditions of classical Indonesian music and dance to schoolchildren in Chester, Pennsylvania.

Critics have praised Whitman’s music as “lyrical” (The Philadelphia Inquirer) “beautiful, sensuous” (Philadelphia Weekly) and “genuinely magical” ( The Boston Herald). Opera News noted his ability “to write dramatic music that soars into lyrical melodies, filled with allusive atmosphere and rich emotional textures."  His many prizes and honors include an ASCAP Foundation Grant and artist residencies at the MacDowell colony and at Yaddo.  He has received commissions from New York's North/South Consonance, Philadelphia's Orchestra 2001, Boston's ALEA III, Network for New Music, and The Philadelphia Singers, among others.  He has worked collaboratively with several choreographers as well as with the poet Nathalie Anderson, with whom he has written several works for the stage.  One of their chamber operas, The Black Swan, was produced in 1998 with stage direction by Sarah Caldwell. 

Recent work includes Babylon, for chorus and chamber orchestra, commissioned and premiered by the Philadelphia Singers; Quartet for Piano and Strings, premiered and recorded by Network for New Music; the score to The Other America, a film by Eugene Martin; and Rossetti Songs for soprano and piano. A Scandal in Bohemia, a new chamber opera written in collaboration with Nathalie Anderson, is based on the Sherlock Holmes story by Arthur Conan Doyle. It was given its world premiere in a concert version February 2009 by Orchestra 2001. Current projects include a new composition for violin and piano commissioned by Marcantonio Barone and Barbara Govatos.

Selected compositions are available on North/South Recordings and Albany Records.

Mr. Whitman lives in Philadelphia with his wife and three children.