Sheila Silver Sheila Silver is an important and vital voice in American music today. She has written in a wide range of mediums: from solo instrumental works to large orchestral works; from opera to feature film scores. Her musical language is a unique synthesis of the tonal and atonal worlds, coupled with a rhythmic complexity which is both masterful and compelling. Again and again, audiences and critics praise her music as powerful and emotionally charged, accessible, and masterfully conceived. Born in Seattle, Washington, Silver began piano studies at the age of five. Ms. Silver earned her Bachelor of Arts from the University of California at Berkeley in 1968 where she began composition studies with Edwin Dugger. Upon graduation she was awarded the coveted George Ladd Prix de Paris for two years study in Europe where she worked with Erhard Karkoscka in Stuttgart and Gyorgy Ligeti in Berlin and Hamburg. She earned her doctorate from Brandeis University where she studied with Arthur Berger, Harold Shapero, and Seymour Shifrin. Her studies also included an Abraham Sachar Traveling Grant which enabled her to spend 18 months in London and a Koussevitzky Fellowship for a summer at the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood where she studied with Jacob Druckman. Sheila Silver's compositions have been commissioned and performed by numerous orchestras, chamber ensembles, and soloists throughout the United States and Europe including: the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, the RAI Orchestra of Rome, the American Composers Orchestra, the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, the Chicago String Ensemble, the Richmond Symphony, the Illinois Symphony, the Gregg Smith Singers, the Hartford Chamber Orchestra, Alexander Paley, Gilbert Kalish, Timothy Eddy, the Guild Trio, Heidi Lehwalder and the Muir Quartet, and the Ying Quartet. Her honors include: a Bunting Institute Fellowship (1977); the Rome Prize (1978); the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Composer Award (1986); twice winner of the ISCM National Composers Competition; and awards and commissions from the Rockefeller Foundation (Bellagio Residency), the Camargo Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, New York State Council of the Arts, the Barlow Foundation, the Paul Fromm Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Cary Trust. Her opera, The Thief of Love, A Lyric-Comic Opera in Three Acts, was featured in New York City OperaÔs Showcasing American Composers, May 2000 and recieved its fully staged world premiere in March 2001 by the Stony Brook Opera with David Lawton, conductor, conducting, Ned Canty, Director, and Sets by Phillip Baldwin. A new work, Moon Prayer, a string sextet commissioned by Concertante, received its premiere at Merkin Hall in New York in February 2002. Her Piano Concerto was performed and recorded by the Lithuanian State Symphony Orchestra, Gintaras Rinkevicius, conductor with Alexander Paley, soloist. The work was written for Mr. Paley and premiered at Carnegie Hall with the American Composers Orchestra in March 1997. The recording of the Concerto, along with Mr. Paley's performance of Silver's Six Preludes for Piano on poems of Baudelaire, will be released by Naxos next season. Silver composed the sound track to Who the Hell is Bobby Roos?, a feature film which was recently awarded the New American Cinema Award at the Seattle International Film Festival, 2002. Sheila Silver lives in New York City with her husband, film writer and director, John Feldman, and is Professor of Music at the State University of New York, Stony Brook. In 1997 she was appointed Charles and Andrea Bronfman Distinguished Visiting Professor of Judaic Studies at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Va. Her music is published by MMB Music, Studio 4 Productions, and Argenta Music, and is recorded on various labels. http://www.hummingbirdfilms.com/ssbio.html

- the new voice in contemporary music -

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