Douglas Knehans has recently been a special guest of the Premieres of the Season Festival in Kiev, Ukraine where the National Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine gave the world premiere of his orchestra work ripple. This work has also been recorded for worldwide CD release on ERM Media Masterworks of the New Era series, distributed by Naxos. The Verdehr Trio also recorded his work rive on Crystal Records and piano virtuoso Michael Kieran Harvey has also recorded his Boyd panels for Move Records (Australia), which also was released in fall 2008. His music for electronic cello is also featured on the CRI Emergency Music series now distributed by New World Records. A disc of his music for acoustic and electronic cello will be released on Ablaze Records in the summer of 2010. His latest commissions are from the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra (Australia) for …mist, memory, shadow… a new work for string orchestra and violin solo; a new double concerto glow (clarinet and violin) for Elsa and Walter Verdehr; a new viola work for Miles Hoffman; and a new two piano work for The Pridonoff Duo.

Knehans holds degrees from the Australian National University; Queens College, CUNY where he graduated with the Luigi Dallapiccola Composition Award (1991) for outstanding achievement in music composition and Yale University where he won the Woods Chandler Memorial Award for best composition in a larger form among others.

He has been featured in three books on Australian music (A Handbook of Australian Music; Directory of Australian Composers and Sound Ideas: Australian Composers Born Since 1950: A Guide to Their Music and Ideas) as well as the International Who’s Who in Music and Musicians Directory (U.K.).

Knehans has been a fellow of the Victorian Council of the Arts, MacDowell Colony and Leighton Artist Colony (Banff), has won awards from the American Music Centre and Meet the Composer and has fulfilled commissions for a wide variety of works from orchestral, to chamber music, opera, dance, choral, electronic and film. He has been a guest of the Czech-American Summer Music Institute in Prague, Czech Republic; New Music, New Faces Festival in Krakow, Poland; the Australian International Summer Orchestra Institute in Hobart, Australia; the Premieres of the Season Festival in Kiev, Ukraine and the Accent 09 and Accent 10 Festivals in Cincinnati, USA.

His music for the short film A Song of Air commissioned by the Australian Film Institute was screened at the prestigious Un Certain Regard section of the Cannes Film Festival and over a dozen others world wide. Knehans’ works have been broadcast on Australian National Radio and T.V., PBS TV, NPR, RAI (Italy) Radio and Television and National Radio and Television of Ukraine. He has been commissioned to write specifically for Australian Broadcasting Corporation Radio and Television programs and his music to the PBS documentary Animal, Vegetable, Mineral was nominated for an EMMY award.

Knehans has fulfilled commissions in virtually every medium from dance to opera, to radio, television, film and the music for concert stage in music praised by The Washington Post as music that is “beautiful” and “tells an exciting story;” by The Miami Herald as “wildly inventive;” and by The Australian as “brilliantly catchy and eerily bright.”

Knehans was a visiting professor of composition at the National University of Singapore (2006) and the Krakow Academy of Music, Poland (2007). He was Director of the University of Tasmania Conservatorium of Music from 2000-2008, created and was the inaugural Artistic Director of the Australian International Summer Orchestra Institute from 2005-2008. Between 2008-2010 he was Dean of the College-Conservatory of Music (CCM) in Cincinnati and is currently the Thomas James Kelly Professor of Music at CCM.

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