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biography
Thomas "Tom" Dempster holds undergraduate degrees from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and graduate degrees, including a doctorate in music composition, from the University of Texas. His music spans a wide berth of genres and styles, from solo instrumental works to pieces for orchestra and soloist, from one-channel fixed media works to interactive choreography-based pieces. A winner of the BMI Student Composer Award, a finalist for the ASCAP Morton Gould Prize, and a recipient of other accolades, his music has been performed and broadcast around the world. Recent performances of his music have occurred in: Istanbul; Chicago; Austin, TX; Berlin; New York; and various conferences throughout the United States.
Dempster has studied composition with Eddie Bass, Kevin Beavers, Donald Grantham, Frank McCarty, Bruce Pennycook, Russell Pinkston, Kevin Puts, Yevgeniy Sharlat, Craig Walsh, and Dan Welcher, and has studied bassoon with Michael Burns. He has previously taught at the University of Texas, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and the Governor's School of North Carolina.
An active musicologist and theorist, he is currently approaching new methods of post-tonal analysis, deconstructing works of art music and popular music by means of gender theory and socio-political history, and exploring the role (if one exists) regarding the impact and necessity of music criticism. Ironically, he spontaneously maintains a music criticism blog and has contributed to SEAMUS and SCI periodicals. He has presented research on electroacoustic analysis and is a frequent submitter to various journals.
Currently, he works and lives as an independent composer in rural central North Carolina. If there is anything else you would like to know, please ask Tom. He may or may not answer.
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