Hello!

Brandon Scott Rumsey (they/them) is a queer, nonbinary artist, composer, and teacher based in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Their work moves between music, writing, and making, with a sustained interest in listening, structure, and embodied experience.

As a composer, Brandon writes music that is coloristic, imaginative, and attentive to timbre and physical space. Their catalog includes solo, chamber, orchestral, wind ensemble, vocal, choral, and incidental music for theatre, often developed in close collaboration with performers. Brandon’s work has been presented internationally in concert and theatrical settings since 2008.

Brandon teaches music theory, aural skills, composition, orchestration, and performance studies, and has taught graduate and undergraduate courses at the University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre & Dance and Madonna University. Their teaching emphasizes listening as a skill that can be trained, refined, and trusted; analysis as an interpretive practice; and technique as a way of supporting clear musical decision-making. In addition to university teaching, Brandon has worked over multiple years with community and artistic partners through residencies with the Trade Wind Ensemble, and maintains a long-standing private practice mentoring composers and songwriters.

Alongside music, Brandon maintains a writing and photographic practice that explores intimacy, self-documentation, and queer embodiment. Often diaristic and audience-facing, this work approaches documentation as a form of presence and care, and engages questions of visibility, pleasure, and lived experience through sustained, personal inquiry.

Brandon is also a fiber artist and teacher. They knit professionally for established designers, publish knitting and crochet patterns, and teach classes at Spun yarn shop in Ann Arbor. This work informs their broader artistic thinking through its emphasis on pattern, repetition, patience, and learning through doing.

Brandon holds a Doctor of Musical Arts degree in Composition, with cognates in Music Theory, Musicology, and Bassoon Performance, and a Graduate Certificate in Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Studies from the University of Michigan. They earned master’s and bachelor’s degrees in Composition from The University of Texas at Austin and the University of Oregon.

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