PETER BOYER

Peter Boyer has emerged in recent years as one of the most frequently performed American orchestral composers of his generation, whose music has been widely acclaimed for its dramatic strength and evocative power. His orchestral works have received nearly 250 public performances, by more than 80 orchestras. He has conducted recordings of his music with the London Symphony Orchestra and the Philharmonia. His works have received national broadcasts in the US and abroad. He has received seven national awards for his work, including two BMI Awards for young composers, the First Music Carnegie Hall commission, and the Lancaster Symphony Composer’s Award.

Boyer has been commissioned by the Boston Pops Orchestra and conductor Keith Lockhart to compose a work celebrating the legacy of the Kennedy brothers premièred in May 2010. Conductor Miguel Harth-Bedoya has appointed Boyer as the 2010–11 composer-in-residence for the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra. Boyer’s music has been performed by the symphony orchestras of Dallas, Nashville, Pacific, Phoenix, Buffalo, Fort Worth, Brooklyn, Kansas City, Virginia, Hartford, Toledo, Richmond, Grand Rapids, Elgin, Rhode Island, Portland, Winston-Salem, Fresno, Santa Barbara, Sarasota, Kalamazoo, Fort Wayne, Greenville, Bamberg, Belgrade, the New York Youth Symphony, Young Musicians Foundation Debut Orchestra, and many others.

Boyer’s major work Ellis Island: The Dream of America, which celebrates the historic American immigrant experience, has been his most successful composition to date premièred in 2002, the work has received over 100 live performances, making it one of the most-performed large-scale orchestral works of the last decade. Boyer recorded the work with the Philharmonia Orchestra and a cast of Oscar-, Emmy-, and Tony-winning actors including Barry Bostwick, Blair Brown, Olympia Dukakis, Anne Jackson, Bebe Neuwirth, Eli Wallach, and Louis Zorich, directed by Martin Charnin. This recording was released by Naxos in its American Classics Series in 2005, and was nominated for a GRAMMY^® Award for Best Classical Contemporary Composition.

In addition to his work for the concert hall, Boyer is active in the film and television music industry. He has contributed orchestral arrangements to more than a dozen major feature film scores, from studios such as Warner Bros, 20th Century Fox, Paramount Pictures, Universal Studios, Disney/Pixar, Columbia Pictures, Touchstone Pictures, and Lionsgate/Marvel. Film composers for whom he has orchestrated music include Oscar-winning Michael Giacchino (Star Trek, Up, Mission: Impossible III, Speed Racer), and the late Michael Kamen (Open Range, First Daughter, Against the Ropes). Boyer has twice arranged and orchestrated music for the Academy Awards, including the 2009 telecast. He scored episodes of the TV series Engineering an Empire for The History Channel.

Boyer’s music has been praised in the Los Angeles Times, USA TODAY, CNN.com, Gramophone and BBC Music Magazine, which featured him in its “Fast Track: Rising Star” column. Boyer has carried out composer residency work in conjunction with performances of his music around the United States, including at Brown University and Vanderbilt University, and with Orange County’s Pacific Symphony. As conductor, Boyer has led such orchestras as the Brooklyn Philharmonic, Hartford Symphony, Rhode Island Philharmonic, and Richmond Symphony, and has conducted recording sessions from London’s famed Abbey Road and Air Studios to the scoring stages of Los Angeles.

Boyer was born in Providence, Rhode Island in 1970, and began composing at the age of 15. His first major composition was a large-scale Requiem Mass in memory of his grandmother, composed while only a teenager. He was named to the first All-USA College Academic Team, comprised of “the 20 best and brightest college students in the nation,” by USA TODAY in 1990. Boyer received his bachelor’s degree from Rhode Island College, which awarded him an honorary Doctor of Music degree in 2004. He received Master of Music and Doctor of Musical Arts degrees from The Hartt School of the University of Hartford, which named him its 2002 Alumnus of the Year. There his teachers included Larry Alan Smith and Harold Farberman. Following his doctoral work, Boyer studied privately with John Corigliano in New York, and moved to Los Angeles to study film and TV scoring at USC, where his teachers included Elmer Bernstein. In 1996, Boyer was appointed to the faculty at Claremont Graduate University, where he presently holds the Helen M. Smith Chair in Music and the rank of Full Professor. In 2003, Boyer launched Propulsive Music, a publishing company representing his music. He resides in Altadena, in the San Gabriel Foothills just north of Los Angeles.

For more information, please visit www.PropulsiveMusic.com.

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