GRAMMY®-nominated PETER BOYER has emerged in recent years as one of the most frequently performed young American orchestral composers, whose music has been widely acclaimed for its dramatic strength and evocative power. Still in his 30s, his orchestral works have received over 200 public performances, by more than 80 orchestras. He has conducted recordings of his music with two of the world’s finest orchestras, the London Symphony Orchestra and the Philharmonia. His music has been performed in venues including New York’s Carnegie Hall and Brooklyn Academy of Music, London’s Abbey Road Studios, Los Angeles’ Royce Hall and Shrine Auditorium, Dallas’ Meyerson Symphony Center, and Fort Worth’s Bass Hall. His music has been broadcast on many national and international radio networks, including National Public Radio in the U.S., Classic FM in the U.K., Bayerischer Rundfunk in Germany, Radio France, and ABC Classic FM in Australia. In 2001, at age 31, he became one of the youngest composers in the world to have an entire disc of his music recorded by a world-class orchestra and distributed by an international record label.

Boyer has won six national competitions, including two BMI Awards, the First Music Carnegie Hall commission, and the Ithaca College Heckscher Prize. Orchestras which have performed his music include the Dallas Symphony, Nashville Symphony, Pacific Symphony, Phoenix Symphony, Buffalo Philharmonic, Fort Worth Symphony, Brooklyn Philharmonic, Virginia Symphony, Hartford Symphony, Toledo Symphony, Richmond Symphony, Grand Rapids Symphony, Kalamazoo Symphony, Elgin Symphony, Rhode Island Philharmonic, Fresno Philharmonic, Santa Barbara Symphony, Winston-Salem Symphony, Portland Symphony, Fort Wayne Philharmonic, Amarillo Symphony, Bamberg Symphony, Belgrade Philharmonic, New York Youth Symphony, Young Musicians Foundation Debut Orchestra, and many others. Conductors who have programmed Boyer’s music include Carl St.Clair, Miguel Harth-Bedoya, JoAnn Falletta, Raymond Harvey, Gisèle Ben-Dor, Bruce Hangen, Stephen Gunzenhauser, Robert Hanson, Grant Cooper, Edvard Tchivzhel, Andrew Massey, Lawrence Golan, and many others. In 2004, Boyer completed a commission from the Pacific Symphony for a large work for soloists, choruses, and orchestra, to celebrate its 25th anniversary season. The finale of this work, On Music’s Wings, featured nearly 1,000 performers, including hundreds of children from throughout Orange County. More recently, Boyer completed a commission through the Continental Harmony program, a partnership of the American Composers Forum and the National Endowment for the Arts, for a large choral-orchestral work, Dreaming a World, which was premiered in Battle Creek, Michigan in March 2007, with over 300 performers.

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. This work was commissioned by The Bushnell Performing Arts Center, and its premiere performance, by the Hartford Symphony under Boyer’s direction, was broadcast on NPR’s SymphonyCast. Ellis Island has been enjoying an extraordinary performance history, with nearly 100 performances by 45 orchestras from its debut in 2002 through the 2008-09 season, making it one of the most-performed large-scale American 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 (co-creator of Annie). This recording was released by Naxos in its American Classics Series in May 2005, and it received a 2006 GRAMMY® Award nomination 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 orchestrations 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®-nominated Michael Giacchino (Star Trek, Up, Speed Racer, Mission: Impossible III), John Ottman (Fantastic Four), Graeme Revell (Pineapple Express), and the late Michael Kamen (Open Range, First Daughter, Against the Ropes). Boyer has twice arranged and orchestrated music for the Academy Awards (Oscars), including the 2009 telecast. He scored episodes of the TV series Engineering an Empire for The History Channel. He conducted music for the Fox Network show Boston Public, and in a departure from his usual work, he conducted the music of Aaron Copland on-camera for two national television commercials.

Boyer’s music has been praised in such publications as The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, USA TODAY, CNN.com, Gramophone and BBC Music Magazine, which featured him in its “Fast Track: Rising Star” column. Boyer holds the Helen M. Smith Chair in Music at Claremont Graduate University, where he has taught since 1996. He also served as a conductor at the Henry Mancini Institute summer program from 1997-2002 (at Cal State Long Beach and UCLA), and in 2000 he served on the faculty of the Conductors Institute at Bard College. Boyer has carried out composer residency work in conjunction with performances of his music around the United States, including at Brown University (2004) and Vanderbilt University (2006), and a six-month residency with Orange County’s Pacific Symphony (2003-04).

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 received national acclaim for this work while still an undergraduate, and 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 relocated to Los Angeles, studying with Elmer Bernstein, David Raksin, Buddy Baker, Christopher Young, and others in the Scoring for Motion Pictures and Television program at the USC School of Music. In 2003, Boyer launched Propulsive Music, a publishing company representing his music. In February 2009, Bill Holab Music in New York became the sales and rental agent for concert works from the Propulsive Music catalog. Boyer presently resides in Altadena, in the San Gabriel Foothills just north of Los Angeles.