Mel Powell Transcriptions

Biography of Mel Powell

Mel Powell was an American pianist and composer who began his career as a celebrated swing-era pianist and arranger for Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller. He radically shifted his focus in the late 1940s, studying classical composition with Paul Hindemith at Yale and becoming a pioneering modernist composer of atonal and electronic music. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1990 for his concerto Duplicates and served as the founding dean of the music school at the California Institute of the Arts.