Byron Adams

Byron Adams (born 1955) is an American composer, conductor, and musicologist.
Biography.
Adams is a composer of tonal music with a strong stylistic profile who employs individual adaptations of traditional techniques. His music has been performed at the 26th Warsaw Autumn International Festival of Contemporary Music, Bargemusic, the Da Camera Society of Los Angeles, and the Conservatoire Américain in Fontainebleau, France (where he taught in the summer of 1992), as well as by such ensembles as Cantus, the West Virginia Symphony Orchestra, and the Philharmonia Orchestra. 
As a musicologist, Adams specializes in British and French music of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His essays have appeared in multiple journals such as "The Musical Quarterly", for which he has also served on the editorial board as an Associate Editor since 2009, and "Music & Letters". 
In 2007, he was appointed scholar-in-residence and a member of the program committee for the Bard Music Festival, for which he was the editor of "Edward Elgar and His World" (Princeton, 2007), in addition to giving pre-concert lectures and contributing program notes. Other notable organizations for which he has written programs notes include the Philadelphia Orchestra and The American Symphony Orchestra, among others. In 2013, Adams was appointed one of the series editors for "Music in Britain 1600–2000", published by The Boydell Press. 
Adams received his Bachelor of Music degree from Jacksonville University, his Master of Music degree from the University of Southern California, and his Doctor of Musical Arts degree from Cornell University. Some of his teachers include Karel Husa, William Weaver Austin, and Halsey Stevens.
Adams is a Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Riverside Department of Music, where he served as department chair from 2002-2005.
Honors, awards, and offices.
Recognition of Adams’s compositions began early in his career. In 1977, he won the Grand Prize of the Delius Festival Composition Competition. In 1984, he was awarded an ASCAP Raymond Hubbell Award for his compositions, and in 1985 he was the recipient of the inaugural Ralph Vaughan Williams Fellowship. Equally appreciated for his work as a musicologist, Adams was the recipient of the American Musicological Society’s Philip Brett Award in 2000 for his essay “The ‘Dark Saying’ of the Enigma: Homoeroticism and the Elgarian Paradox,” published in "Nineteenth-Century Music" and book chapter “’No Armpits, Please, We’re British’: Whitman and English Music, 1884–1936,” in "Walt Whitman and Modern Music: War, Desire and the Trials of Nationhood", both published that same year.
From 2006-2009 Adams served first as Vice President (2006-07) and then as President of the North American British Music Studies Association, where he was later inducted as a Lifetime Honorary Member in 2020. In 2008, the Association instituted the Byron Adams Student Travel Grant, a fellowship offering assistance to conference presenters.
Adams was a guest lecturer at Gresham College, London in December of 2007, while he was a visiting fellow for the Institute of Musical Research, School of Advanced Studies of the University of London.
In 2010 Adams was named one of Jacksonville University’s “Distinguished Dolphins” (a Distinguished Alumni Award for Excellence), one of only 75 to receive this honor since the founding of the university up to that year.
Selected list of compositions.
Publishers of works by Byron Adams include Earthsongs, Fatrock Ink, Editions BIM, Paraclete Press, and E.C. Schirmer