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 nearly 200 public performances, by 70 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 received many national and international radio broadcasts, including NPR in the U.S., Classic FM in the U.K., Bayerischer Rundfunk in Germany, Radio France, and also in Belgium, The Netherlands, and 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, Brooklyn Philharmonic, Buffalo Philharmonic, Fort Worth Symphony, Virginia Symphony, Bamberg Symphony, Toledo Symphony, Hartford Symphony, Richmond Symphony, Kalamazoo Symphony, Rhode Island Philharmonic, Fresno Philharmonic, Santa Barbara Symphony, Fort Wayne Philharmonic, Amarillo Symphony, Wheeling Symphony, 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, Raymond Harvey, JoAnn Falletta, Gisèle Ben-Dor, Grant Cooper, Bruce Hangen, Andrew Massey, Edvard Tchivzhel, 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. Boyer recently 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 over 90 performances by more than 40 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 industry. He recently composed scores for four episodes of The History Channel series Engineering an Empire. Boyer has contributed orchestrations to such film scores as Speed Racer (Warner Bros.), Mission: Impossible III (Paramount), Fantastic Four (20th Century Fox), Open Range (Touchstone), First Daughter (Regency), and Against the Ropes (Paramount), among others. Film and television composers for whom he has orchestrated include Michael Giacchino, the late Michael Kamen, John Ottman, Graeme Revell, Blake Neely, Bill Conti, and Mark Watters. Boyer has composed scores for several short films, including Covenant, which played at more than twenty film festivals in the U.S. and Europe. He has 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 film music with Elmer Bernstein, David Raksin, Buddy Baker, and others at USC. In 2003, Boyer launched Propulsive Music, a publishing company representing his music. Boyer presently resides in La Viña, in the San Gabriel Foothills of Altadena just north of Los Angeles.