Felciano, Richard, American composer; b. Santa Rosa, Calif., Dec. 7, 1930. He studied with Milhaud at Mills College in Oakland, California (1952) and subsequently at the Paris Cons. (1953-55). As a student living in San Francisco, he supported himself by singing in a liturgical choir of men and boys, during which time he twice sang the complete liturgical year in Dominican chant and from neumatic notation. This experience had a profound effect on his style, even in orchestral and electronic music, and it was reinforced by several residencies at the Abbey of Solesmes while he was a student in Paris. After a period of service in the U.S. Army, he studied privately with Dallapiccola in Florence. While there, he met and married Rita Baumgartner, a native of Zürich, who later, as Rita Felciano, became a recognized American dance critic. In 1959 he took his Ph.D. at the Univ. of Iowa. In 1964 he received a Ford Foundation fellowship to serve as Composer-in-residence to Cass Technical High School in Detroit, during which he composed a number of works for student ensembles, some of which employed aleatory techniques and graphic notation. Returning to San Francisco in 1965, he received a series of commissions for the Roman Catholic liturgy in the wake of the liberalizing directives of the 2nd Vatican Council (1964). One of these commissions, Pentecost Sunday, introduced electronic sound into

liturgical music and assumed a permanent place in its repertory. In 1967 he was appointed resident composer to the National Center for Experiments in Television in San Francisco, a pioneering effort by the Rockefeller Foundation to explore television as a non-documentary, non-narrative medium. As a participant in this project, he created Linearity, A Television Piece for Harp and Live Electronics, the first musical work using the technical properties of a television system as an instrumental component. In the same year, he joined the music faculty of the University of California at Berkeley. In 1968 he received a Guggenheim fellowship and in 1971 a 2-year fellowship from the Ford Foundation as Composer-in-residence to the City of Boston. During that residency, he created a 14-channel electronic environment with light sculptures of his own design for Boston City Hall and Galactic Rounds (1972), an orchestral work whose climax deploys rotating trumpets and trombones to create Doppler shifts, an early indication of his interest in acoustics which was to become pronounced in later decades. In 1974 he received an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and in 1975 was a resident fellow at the Rockefeller Foundation's International Study and Conference Center in Bellagio. From 1974 to 1978 he served as a panelist for the NEA and from 1976 to 1980 was an Art Commissioner for the City of San Francisco. In 1976 he

was commissioned to compose a work joining an Eastern with a Western instrument for the 12th World Congress of the International Musicological Society at Berkeley, a pioneering forum in the growth of East-West studies in music. The result was In Celebration of Golden Rain (1977) for Indonesian gamelan and pipe organ, a work which addressed the conflicting scales, design, and intent of the instruments of these two cultures as a problem of symbiosis rather than one of fusion, making a philosophical as well as a musical statement. Many subsequent works show the influence of non-Western cultures. In 1982-3 he was active at IRCAM in Paris, where his encounter with the new field of cognitive psychology in its musical applications gave a scientific articulation to a lifelong interest in acoustics. He returned to Berkeley and in 1987 founded the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT), an interdisciplinary facility linking music, cognitive psychology, linguistics, computer science, and architecture. His interest in the latter is reflected in his musical analysis and commentary in M. Treib: Space Calculated in Seconds: The Philips Pavilion, Le Corbusier, Varèse (Princeton U. Press, 1996). In 1999 he received a Library of Congress Koussevitzky commission. His music reflects an acute interest in acoustics and sonority and an attempt to cast them in ritual, architectural, or dramatic forms.