Grammy-nominated PETER BOYER has emerged in recent years as one of the most frequently performed American orchestral composers of his generation. His orchestral works have received over 250 public performances, by 90 orchestras. He has conducted recordings of his music with two of the world’s finest orchestras, the London Symphony Orchestra and the Philharmonia. His works have received numerous national broadcasts in the U.S. 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.
Conductor Keith Lockhart chose Boyer for the Boston Pops 125th anniversary commission honoring the legacy of John, Robert, and Ted Kennedy. Acclaimed actors Robert De Niro, Morgan Freeman, Ed Harris, and Cherry Jones narrated the premiere of Boyer’s The Dream Lives On: A Portrait of the Kennedy Brothers in May 2010, which was attended by many members of the Kennedy family, and received extensive national media attention. Boyer’s work was the centerpiece of the TV special An American Salute: The Boston Pops at 125, produced and broadcast by WCVB-TV, Boston’s ABC affiliate. A commercial recording of Boyer’s new work will soon be released by the Boston Pops. In addition, it will be performed as part of the 37th annual Boston Pops Fourth of July concert on the Charles River Esplanade, and telecast on WBZ-TV, Boston’s CBS affiliate. The Boston Pops will also perform the work with narrator Alec Baldwin at Tanglewood, and with narrator Chris Cooper at Hyannis.
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 for actors and orchestra, which celebrates the historic American immigrant experience, has been his most successful composition to date. Premiered in 2002, the work has received over 100 live performances by 50 orchestras, making it one of the most-performed American orchestral works of the last decade. Boyer’s recording of this work 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, Disney/Pixar, Universal Studios, Columbia Pictures, Touchstone Pictures, and Lionsgate/Marvel. Film composers for whom he has orchestrated music include Michael Giacchino (the Oscar-winning Up, Star Trek, Mission: Impossible III, Speed Racer), Mark Isham (Robert Redford’s The Conspirator) 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 work has been profiled and reviewed in such media outlets as the Associated Press, Los Angeles Times, Variety, USA TODAY, CNN.com, The Boston Globe, 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, then 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 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. In 2009, Bill Holab Music became the rental and sales agent for Propulsive Music. Boyer resides in Altadena, in the San Gabriel Foothills just north of Los Angeles.
