Beglarian, Grant, 1927-2002

Grant Beglarian (b. December 1, 1927; d. July 5, 2002), primarily known as a composer and music educator, was born in Tiflis, Georgia, known today as Tbilisi, the country’s capital. His parents relocated to Georgia to escape the Armenian Genocide carried out by the Ottoman government in 1915. Soon after his birth, he and his parents moved to Iran where he was trained in composition and violin performance at the Royal Conservatory of Tehran. Beglarian came to the United States in 1947 to continue his music education, briefly studying at Boston University before transferring to the University of Michigan, where he studied under Ross Lee Finney until receiving a DMA in 1958. During this time he served in the U.S. Army from 1951-1953 as a violist for the Seventh Army Symphony Orchestra. He later studied with Aaron Copland at the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood in Massachusetts from 1959-1960.

During the 1960s, Beglarian was a field director and project director for the Ford Foundation (1961-1968) and an editor for Prentice-Hall publishers (1961-1969). One of the primary projects he oversaw for the Ford Foundation was the Contemporary Music Project for Creativity in Music Education (CMP), organized by the Music Educators National Conference (MENC) (now the National Association for Music Education (NAfME)). He served as the director of the CMP from 1965-1969. He also participated in the CMP as a composer-in-residence for the Composer in Public Schools (CPS) program. In 1969 Beglarian accepted the position of Dean of Performing Arts at the University of Southern California where he served for the next thirteen years. Beginning in the early 1980s he served as president and CEO of the National Foundation for the Advancement of Arts (1981-1991). In the last decade of his life, right up until his death, Beglarian was the international coordinator and director of global partnerships among educational organizations for the interactive website ThinkQuest. He died of lung cancer at White Plains Hospital near his home in Scarborough, NY.