Harold Meltzer

Composer Harold Meltzer has won several awards and fellowships, is a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and founded and was, for many years, co-director of the Sequitur ensemble. He is known to take inspiration for his compositions from a variety of sources. Meltzer was born in Brooklyn in 1966. He studied piano and music theory with Morton Estrin before attending Amherst College, where he studied piano with Robert Miller, bassoon with Frank Morelli, and composition with Lewis Spratlan. He then attended King's College, Cambridge for philosophy, while also studying composition with Alexander Goehr. He completed his schooling at Yale in 2000 after earning his master's and a doctorate of music. His teachers at Yale included Martin Bresnick, Anthony Davis, and Richard Rephann. He also earned a JD from Columbia University in 1992, though he no longer practices law. He founded and, for 15 years, was the co-director of the New York-based ensemble Sequitur. From 2005-2012, Meltzer taught at Vassar College. Meltzer has written for a wide variety of instrumentations, many of which have brought acclaim. He's been commissioned by several major organizations in the U.S., including the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, and the Library of Congress. His 2008 composition Brion, for flute, oboe, guitar, mandolin, violin, and cello earned him a nomination as a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize. His other compositions include works for orchestra such as Full Faith and Credit (2004) and Fortunes (2016). His solo works include Blush, for cello (2000), Toccatas, for harpsichord (2005), and Iconography, for piano (2014). He's also written for chamber groups, voice, and choir. The first album dedicated to Meltzer's works was a Naxos release in 2010 titled Harold Meltzer: Brion; Sindbad; Exiles. In 2019, Meltzer was nominated for a Grammy Award for Songs and Structures on the Bridge label. Meltzer has won a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Arts and Letters Award in Music and the Charles Ives Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Barlow and Rome Prizes.
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