Phillip Ramey

Phillip Ramey (born September 12, 1939) is an American composer, pianist, and writer on music. Ramey was born in Elmhurst, Illinois. He studied composition with the Russian-born composer Alexander Tcherepnin from 1959 to 1962, first at the International Academy of Music in Nice, France, then at DePaul University in Chicago. He later studied composition with Jack Beeson at Columbia University (1962–65). Ramey has had professional associations with Aaron Copland, Samuel Barber, Leonard Bernstein, Virgil Thomson, William Schuman, David Diamond and Vladimir Horowitz. Thomson honored him with a musical portrait for piano titled "Phillip Ramey: Thinking Hard," and Copland dedicated two piano pieces to him: "Midsummer Nocturne" and "Proclamation." For many years, Ramey was a close friend and a neighbor of Paul Bowles in Tangier, Morocco, where he has summered regularly. In 2017, the New York Public Library acquired Ramey's archive of manuscripts, scores and recordings of his music, which will be catalogued and made available for scholarly research. Ramey is the composer of orchestral works, including three piano concertos, along with chamber music and many works for solo piano, among them ten sonatas. In 1993 his Concerto for Horn and String Orchestra, commissioned by the New York Philharmonic to celebrate its 150th anniversary, was premiered by that orchestra under Leonard Slatkin, with Philip Myers as soloist. On Nov. 14, 1985, Proclamation for Orchestra, Ramey's orchestration of Copland's Proclamation for Piano, received an unusual bi-coastal premiere: by the New York Philharmonic under Zubin Mehta and the Los Angeles Philharmonic conducted by Erich Leinsdorf. (The New York Philharmonic concert was telecast as "Aaron Copland's 85th Birthday," episode 61 of the Live from Lincoln Center telecasts.) Ramey's music has been published by Boosey & Hawkes, G. Schirmer, C. F. Peters and Edward B. Marks, among other firms. Ramey is the author of several hundred liner notes and interviews with American composers, and served from 1977 to 1993 as the annotator and Program Editor for the New York Philharmonic. He is also the author of Irving Fine: An American Composer in His Time, which received the 2006 ASCAP Deems Taylor/Nicolas Slonimsky Award for Outstanding Musical Biography. Ramey appeared in the 1998 documentary Let It Come Down: The Life of Paul Bowles and the 2000 documentary Night Waltz: The Music of Paul Bowles. He is presently Vice-President Emeritus of The Tcherepnin Society.