Margaret Brouwer, born on February 8, 1940, in Michigan, is an esteemed American composer and composition educator. She is the founder of the Blue Streak Ensemble, a chamber music group dedicated to performing contemporary works.
Brouwer has received widespread recognition for the lyricism, musical imagery, and emotional depth in her compositions. Her accolades include an Award in Music from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Meet The Composer Commissioning/USA award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and an Individual Fellowship from the Ohio Council for the Arts. Additionally, she has been honored with the Cleveland Arts Prize, the Lebenbom Award, the Ettelson Prize, and awards from the International Women’s Brass Conference, as well as grants from various organizations such as the National Endowment for the Arts, New Music USA, the Ford Foundation, the John S. Knight Foundation, the Cleveland Foundation, and Cuyahoga Arts and Culture. Critics have praised her music, describing it as “devoid of slickness…true to a vision” (New York Times), “inhabiting its own peculiarly bewitching harmonic world” (New York Times), and “a marvelous example of musical imagery” (American Record Guide).
In 2015, the Music Division of the Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center established the Margaret Brouwer Collection, which houses her scores, manuscripts, papers, and recordings for research purposes by scholars, composers, and performers. She was recognized as one of "The Best of Female Classical Composers" on Naxos' album POWER TO THE WOMEN. From 1996 to 2008, Dr. Brouwer led the Composition Department and held the Vincent K. and Edith H. Smith Chair in Composition at the Cleveland Institute of Music, where she is now professor emeritus.
Brouwer was also the NEA Composer in Residence with the Roanoke Symphony in Virginia from 1992 to 1997 and served as Composer-in-Residence at Washington and Lee University from 1988 to 1996. Her residencies have included the MacDowell Colony, where she was a Norton Stevens Fellow, the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Charles Ives Center for American Music. Her works have been recorded on labels including Naxos, New World, CRI, Crystal, Centaur, and Opus One.
Brouwer began her musical journey by studying at Oberlin College, graduating in 1962, and later obtaining a master's degree from Michigan State University. She initially pursued a career as a professional violinist with the Fort Worth Symphony and Dallas Symphony before earning her DMA in composition from Indiana University. Her notable teachers include Donald Erb, Harvey Sollberger, Frederick A. Fox, and George Crumb.
In addition to her teaching and composing, Brouwer was in residence at the Wellesley Composers Conference in 2002 and at the MacDowell Colony in 2001, where she was a Norton Stevens Fellow in 1999. She served as Composer-in-Residence at Indiana University in 2004.
In 2004, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, and in 2006, she received an award in music from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2010, she received a Meet The Composer Commissioning/USA award for her composition "Path at Sunrise, Masses of Flowers," which premiered with the Cleveland Women's Symphony.
Brouwer founded the Blue Streak Ensemble in 2011, which focuses on her compositions, works by other contemporary composers, and arrangements of classic repertoire. The ensemble also initiated the 'Music by the Lake' series, featuring summer performances around the northern Ohio Lake Erie region. Her Violin Concerto has been performed by Michi Wiancko with both the South Carolina Philharmonic and the Columbus Georgia Symphonies. Among her students are notable composers Peter Gilbert and Joseph Hallman.
