Composition Program Coordinator
Director of the Experimental Music Studio (xMUSE)
School of Music
University of South Carolina
Columbia, SC 29208 USA
Phone: (803) 777-8183
School of Music, Room 316
E-Mail: rbain@mozart.sc.edu

A composer and theorist with a specialty in computer music, Reginald Bain (b. 1963) holds degrees from Northwestern University and the University of Notre Dame where he studied mathematics, computer science and music. After receiving his B.S. degree in mathematics and computer science from Notre Dame in 1985, he moved to Chicago to study composition and computer music at Northwestern University (D.M. 1991; M.M., 1986) with Gary Greenberg, Gary Kendall, M. William Karlins and Alan Stout. In 1986, he was awarded a Salter Fellowship in Composition to study at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles where his teachers included Robert Linn, David Raksin, and Leonard Stein. In 1991, he accepted a position at the University of South Carolina where he currently resides and serves as Professor of Composition and Theory, Composition Program Coordinator, and Director of the Experimental Music Studio (xMUSE).

Dr. Bain has composed a wide variety of instrumental, choral and vocal music that has been performed by leading artists across the U.S., Europe and Asia. He has also written extensively for the theatre, composing original songs and incidental music for plays by Bertolt Brecht, June Havoc, Molière, Sean O’Casey, and Sophocles, among others, and William Shakespeare’s As You Like It, King Lear, Macbeth, Midsummer Night’s Dream, Othello, and Twelfth Night. An accomplished electroacoustic composer, his works employ a wide array of algorithmic and real-time interactive techniques implemented in computer music composition environments such as Csound, Max/MSP and SuperCollider.

A two-time recipient of USC’s BellSouth Instructional Innovation Grant for applications of telecommunications technology in the classroom, he is the author of several computer-assisted analysis and composition applications including Algorithmic Composition with Max, AtonalAssistant, MatrixMaker, SLAPI, The Harmonic Series, and WebNHT which have been featured at a series of papers delivered at the Association for Technology in Music Instruction national conference. As a theorist, he recently served as editorial consultant and contributor for Chapter 28 “An Introduction to Twentieth-Century Music” of McGraw Hill’s widely acclaimed theory textbook Tonal Harmony by Stephan Kostka and Dorothy Payne.

Dr. Bain has received two awards for his teaching: USC’s Michael J. Mungo University Teaching Award and the Outstanding Music Educator of the Year Award from USC’s MENC chapter. In addition to offering courses in composition, theory and computer music, he teaches two interdisciplinary courses for USC’s Honors College: Philosophical Perspectives on Music and Music and Science.

Links: Reg Bain's Web Site ~ Composition Program ~ xMUSE