Martin Regan

Department Head
Department of Performance Studies
College of Liberal Arts

Martin Regan has composed more than seventy-five works for traditional Japanese instruments and since 2002 has been affiliated with AURA-J—one of Japan’s premiere performance ensembles of contemporary-traditional Japanese music. Widely regarded as the authoritative source on the subject and the only resource of its kind available in English, his translation of Minoru Miki’s orchestration-instrumentation manual Composing for Japanese Instruments was published by the University of Rochester Press in 2008

Regan will use his Arts & Humanities Fellowship, Selected Works for Western Orchestral Instruments and Voice, to support the recording of a series of compact discs that will feature his works for Western orchestral instruments and voice. The compact discs will be recorded in Houston in collaboration with members of the contemporary music ensemble APERIO and released by Navona Records for national and international distribution between 2018-20. The recordings will feature existing works as well as new works for strings, brass, winds, and piano, as well as selected vocal and choral works.

In 2006, Regan received his doctorate in music from the University of Hawai’i at Manoa. He joined the Texas A&M faculty in 2007.

His external honors and grants include 2015-16 Clare Hall Visiting Research Fellow, Cambridge University; 2015 Helene Wurlitzer Foundation Artist Residency; 2010-12 Crawley Family Faculty Fellow in Music; and a 2005-06 Japan Foundation Doctoral Fellowship.

Compositions and performances during 2016 include Alleluia and Sonnet 60, commissioned and performed by the Wolfson College Choir in Cambridge, England; Still, commissioned and performed by Kiku Day at Haifa University, Israel; shadowspot, commissioned and performed by Mariana Gariazzo at the XXXI International Flute Festival in Lima, Peru; Silent Cry of Heron, commissioned and performed by Kiku Day and Kenneth Larsen at the Carl Nielson Museum in Odense, Denmark; and Three Incantations, commissioned and performed by Michie Kobayashi at Suginami Hall, Tokyo. Performances in 2017 include his newly-composed Shamisen Concerto No. 1: “Polaris”, commissioned by Yoko Reikano Kimura at National Opera Center America; and Magic Mirror at the Miller Theater, Columbia University for the 12th Annual Concert of Japanese Heritage Musical Instruments.