Peter Boyer

The music of composer Peter Boyer has been performed more than 500 times by some 200 orchestras around the U.S. and beyond. Boyer is also active as a conductor who has often led performances and recordings of his own works. Boyer was born on February 10, 1970, in Providence, Rhode Island. He attended Rhode Island College as an undergraduate and was named to the All-USA College Academic Team by the USA Today newspaper while he was there. As an undergraduate, he issued the song I Can Recall, and by the mid-'90s, he was composing full-scale orchestral works. Boyer moved to Hartt College of Music in nearby Hartford, Connecticut, for master's and doctoral degrees, studying composition with Larry Alan Smith and Robert Carl and conducting with Harold Farberman. He rounded out his education with private lessons from John Corigliano and with attendance at the Scoring for Motion Pictures and Television Program at the USC Thornton School of Music; his teachers there included Elmer Bernstein, David Raksin, Buddy Baker, and Christopher Young. In 1996, he joined the faculty at Claremont Graduate University in California, where he continues to teach as of the early 2020s. Boyer established his own publishing company, Propulsive Music, in 2003. In 2001, Boyer conducted the London Symphony Orchestra in an album of his own works, released on the Koch International label. He has continued to record similar albums, released on Naxos, and these have contributed to his growing popularity; 2003's Ellis Island: The Dream of America featured the Philharmonia Orchestra. That work has gone on to be performed more than 200 times. Boyer's works have been performed and often commissioned by major U.S. orchestras, both mainstream groups such as the National Symphony Orchestra, Philadelphia Orchestra, and Cleveland Orchestra, and pops groups, including the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra and the Cincinnati Pops. The Boston Pops and conductor Keith Lockhart commissioned Boyer's The Dream Lives On: A Portrait of the Kennedy Brothers in 2012; the premiere performance was narrated by actors Robert De Niro, Ed Harris, and Morgan Freeman. Boyer has also composed or orchestrated music for films and television shows. In the 2010s, Boyer served as composer-in-residence with the Fort Worth Symphony and the Pasadena Symphony, and in 2017, a Pacific Symphony performance of Ellis Island: The Dream of America was broadcast on the PBS television network's Great Performances series. Boyer's Balance of Power (2020), written for a 95th-birthday celebration of former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, and Fanfare for Tomorrow for concert band, composed for the inauguration of President Joe Biden in 2021, were included on Boyer's 2022 London Symphony Orchestra release Balance of Power: Orchestral Works.
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