Biography

Born and raised in Sacramento, California, Ben Phelps (b. 1980) is currently earning a reputation as one of Southern California's most exciting young composers with his bold, original, and dramatically arresting music. Since relocating to Los Angeles, he has become very active in the city's ever exapnding cultural scene, and hopes to help lead a new generation of Californian composers towards a new, reinvigorated concert music style.

Phelps is the youngest composer ever to be performed by the internationally acclaimed Verdehr Trio, a chamber group dedicated to new American music. His music has performed at the Aspen Music Festival, the Ashland New Music Concerts in Ashland, Oregon, by the UCLA Percussion Ensemble, the USC Symphony and Contemporary Music Ensemble, the Bakersfield Symphony New Music Group, the Fireworks! Ensemble at the Oregon Bach Festival, in Germany by tenor Gregory Wiest, and at countless performances in Los Angeles through his frequent collaborations with the Definiens Project. He has been commissioned by the Hanson Institute for American Music, the one-of-a-kind bass clarinet duo Sqwonk, the Tonoi Ensemble, and flutist Alaina Bercilla. His orchestral piece, Overture Maximus, premiered in February 2007 by the USC Thornton Symphony, has been awarded the Sadye J. Moss Endowed Musical Composition Prize by the University of Southern California. The piece has received multiple radio broadcasts in Los Angeles on classical KUSC 91.5. The piece and others of Ben Phelps were also the subject of an extended feature by Martin Perlich on KCSN 88.5 Arts and Roots Radio, as part of his Arts and Roots Forum interview series.

Phelps is a member of Rogue Artists Ensemble, a pioneering theater / puppeteering troupe based in Los Angeles which the LA Times recently said “set a new standard for sub-99-seat theater.” His music to a wordless vignette produced by the Rogue’s, The Dreams of Magdelena, was said to be “sonically brilliant” by the Orange County Weekly. The Mysterious Adventures of Johnny Crumb, an innovative theater piece with story, book, and music by Ben Phelps, was recently produced by the Rogue's at the Son of Semele theater in Los Angeles. The production, somewhat in the vein of Stravinsky's L'Histoire du Soldat meets Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf, featured puppets, live actors, multimedia, and of course Phelps's music. The LA Weekly has called his work with the Rogues "enchanting" and "haunting."

Phelps is also an active performing percussionist. He is former timpanist for both the Young Musician's Foundation Debut Orchestra and the American Youth Symphony, where he was also formerly principal percussionist- two of the most prestigious pre-professional training orchestras in the country. He was recently seen performing in the LAPhil’s groundbreaking 2006 Minimalist Jukebox Festival, the first comprehensive festival of minimalist music produced by a major American orchestra, and as solo percussionist in a performance of British wunderkind Thomas Adès's breakout opera Powder Her Face, conducted by Adès himself and produced jointly by the LAPhil and the University of Southern California. An exceptional marimbist, he has premiered many of his own works, and was the percussion soloist for the world premier of the revised Cronica, a percussion concerto by Ian Krouse, in UCLA’s Royce Hall. Steve Reich called his performance of Nagoya Marimbas at a concert honoring Reich's 70th birthday "the best I've ever seen- and I don't say that." He has also been the percussionist for the contemporary music ensemble at the Brevard Music Festival in Brevard, North Carolina, where he studied with percussionist extraordinaire Timothy Adams, and has attended the prestigious Aspen Music Festival as both a percussionist and a composer.

He holds a B.A. and Master’s Degree in Music from the University of California, Los Angeles, and is currently pursuing a DMA at the USC Thornton School of Music. He has studied with Ian Krouse, Don Crockett, Paul Chihara, Frank Ticheli, Frederick Lesemann, the late Jerry Goldsmith, iconoclastic musicologist Susan McClary, and percussionist Mitch Peters.