Composition and Theory 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 for 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 coordinator of the Composition and Theory programs, and as 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, in addition to his original score and incidental music for 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 the computer music composition environments Csound, Max/MSP and SuperCollider. His current area of research is musical sonification.

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 AtonalAssistant, Twelve-Tone Assistant, SLAPI, and The Harmonic Series which have been featured at a series of papers delivered at the Association for Technology in Music Instruction's national conference. As a theorist, he recently took over the revision of Part Six, "An Introduction to Twentieth-Century Music," the final three chapters 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