Joel Feigin, a professor of music, has received a $10,000 commission from the prestigious Fromm Music Foundation to compose a concerto for piano and chamber orchestra for Israeli-American pianist Yael Weiss.

Founded by the late Paul Fromm and located at Harvard University, the Fromm Foundation has commissioned over 300 new compositions and their performances, and has sponsored hundreds of new music concerts and concert series.

Feigin, who joined the UCSB faculty in 1992, studied with Nadia Boulanger at Fontainbleau and with Roger Sessions at The Juilliard School, where he received his doctor of musical arts degree. His honors and awards include a Senior Fulbright Fellowship at the Moscow Conservatory in Russia and a Guggenheim Fellowship to write his first opera, “Mysteries of Eleusis,” which was commissioned for Theatre Cornell.

The complete opera was presented again in 1999 at the Moscow Conservatory, which requested a chamber version that it produced in 2000 as part of the Russian-American Festival of Operatic Art. Feigin’s opera, “Twelfth Night,” based on the play by William Shakespeare, was commissioned and premiered by Long Leaf Opera in 2005.

Feigin’s performances and commissions include works for groups such as the Chamber Orchestra Kremlin, Santa Barbara Symphony, Group for Contemporary Music, Auros Group for New Music, Voices of Change, and others. His award-winning work “Veränderungen” for violin and piano was most recently featured in the National Gallery of Art’s Festival of American Music.

An accomplished pianist and accompanist, Feigin is often called upon to participate in performances of his own works, such as “Veränderungen” with Juilliard Quartet violinist (and former UCSB professor) Ronald Copes, and “Echoes from the Holocaust” with members of the Czech Philharmonic in Prague.

Weiss, for whom Feigin will compose the concerto, was a visiting music lecturer at UCSB in 2004 and 2005. She is currently an associate professor of music at Indiana University.