Celebrated American composer Sheila Silver talks about her music and career, in advance of the Asian premiere (October 18) of her Four Etudes and a Fantasy with the Cong Quartet.
The event is free and open to the public. Check back later for a link to register your seat.
Biography
Sheila Silver is an important and vital voice in American music today. Her compositions have been commissioned and performed by numerous orchestras, ensembles, and soloists throughout the world. 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. Audiences and critics have praised her music as powerful and emotionally charged, accessible, and masterfully conceived. “Only a few composers in any generation enliven the art form with their musical language and herald new directions in music. Sheila Silver is such a visionary.” (Wetterauer Zeitung)
Her opera, A Thousand Splendid Suns, based on Khaled Hosseini’s international best-selling novel, was premiered in 2023 by the Seattle Opera to rave reviews and was short-listed for Best World Premiere by the International Opera Awards 2023. In preparation for and throughout the composing of this opera, Silver studied Hindustani music with the late Pandit Kedar Narayan Bodas in India, in order to incorporate an authentic Hindustani musical color into her score. A chamber opera version with the same cast and an orchestra of 12 is in the works, with the premiere to be announced soon.
Her honors include: a 2013 Guggenheim Fellowship, numerous Opera America awards for the development of A Thousand Splendid Suns, the Sackler Prize in Music Composition for the opera The Wooden Sword; Bunting Institute Fellowship; the Rome Prize; the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Composer Award; NEA awards, two ISCM National Composers Competition wins; 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 music is published by Lauren Keiser Music, Mostly Marimba, and Argenta Music, and is recorded on various labels.
Born and raised in Seattle, Washington, she earned her BA from University of California Berkeley (1968) and her PhD from Brandeis University (1976). Her mentors and teachers include Edwin Dugger, Erhard Karkoschka, György Ligeti, Arthur Berger, and Jacob Druckman. Sheila currently lives in Spencertown, New York, with her husband, filmmaker John Feldman. Silver is Professor Emerita of Music at the State University of New York, Stony Brook.