Richard Benedum is the Alumni Chair in the Humanities and Professor of Music at the University of Dayton He served as the Department of Music chair from 1980-88, and again from 1996 to 2001. He received the College of Arts and Sciences Award for Teaching in 1994; a state-wide award, the Ohioana Library Association Music Citation, a state-wide award, in 1995; the inaugural Opus Award from Culture Works as the outstanding arts educator in greater Dayton in 1996; and the University of Dayton Alumni Award for Teaching in 1998, and the Ovation Award from the Vocal Arts Resource Network of Ohio in 2001. He is also the founder and former music director of the Dayton Bach Society, a highly regarded semi-professional chorus, and has conducted all the major oratorios and numerous cantatas of Bach, as well as other major works from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. He is also active as an organ recitalist and church musician. He organizes the First Tuesday Lecture Series.
Dr. Benedum directed seven Summer Seminars and Institutes for teachers, based in Vienna and studying the music of Mozart, for the National Endowment for the Humanities between 1990 and 2001, and will lead antoher in 2003. He has also directed numerous interdisciplinary Mini-Institutes for teachers on operas, especially by Mozart, in Ohio and Florida, supported with NEH and Ohio Humanities Council funding. He wrote and produced a six-part series of programs for National Public Radio on "Mozart: His Music and His Letters," which was broadcast by an estimated 150 stations nationally. He has been a review panel member for the National Endowment for Humanities four times, and is a consultant for the Ohio Arts Council and Ohio Humanities Council. He has received more than 250 grants for performances, workshops and symposia, and research totalling more than $1,250,000. Since 1976 he has written program notes for the Dayton Philharmonic Orchestra.
Dr. Benedum received his D.M.A. in organ performance from the University of Oregon, where he studied with John Hamilton. He subsequently studied organ and conducting with Helmuth Rilling (Stuttgart, Germany) and musicology with Christoph Wolff (Harvard University). His research interests include compositional process in Bach's works, and the meaning and pattern of articulation marks in Bach's autograph manuscripts, and the operas and early biographical studies of Mozart.