Congratulations to Roger Zare for being named Alabama Orchestra Associaiton’s Composition Contest 2016 winner with his work titled Tangents. This piece will be premiered by the Festival Orchestra on February 14, 2016 at Moody Music Building in Tuscaloosa.

Roger Zare has been praised for his “enviable grasp of orchestration” (New York Times) and for writing music with “formal clarity and an alluringly mercurial surface.” He was born in Sarasota, Florida, and has written for a wide variety of ensembles, from solo instruments to choir to full orchestra. Often inspired by science, nature, mathematics, and mythology, his colorfully descriptive works have been performed across the United States by such ensembles as the American Composers Orchestra, the Minnesota Orchestra, the Sarasota Orchestra, the Omaha Symphony, the Sioux City Symphony, the Cabrillo Festival Orchestra, the Aspen Music Festival Contemporary Ensemble, and the New York Youth Symphony. An award winning composer, Zare has received the ASCAP Nissim Prize, three BMI Student Composer Awards, an ASCAP Morton Gould award, a New York Youth Symphony First Music Commission, the 2008 American Composers Orchestra Underwood Commission, a Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and many other local and regional honors. He has been composer in residence at the Salt Bay Chamber Music Festival, the Chamber Music Festival of Lexington, the Chesapeake Chamber Music Festival, the SONAR New Music Ensemble, and has also received a Copland House Residency Award. A recent collaboration brought Zare to Switzerland, where he partnered with CERN to present his saxophone quartet, “LHC,” at the 2014 Montreux Jazz Festival in a program featuring the collision of music and physics. His compositions are published by Theodore Presser Inc, the FJH Music Company, Manhattan Beach Music, and Roger Zare Music. He is a member of ASCAP. As a pianist, Zare performed his chamber work, “Geometries,” alongside violinist Cho-Liang Lin, cellist Jian Wang, and clarinetist Burt Hara at the 2014 Hong Kong International Chamber Music Festival.

Zare holds a DMA (’12) from the University of Michigan, where he has studied with Michael Daugherty, Paul Schoenfield, Bright Sheng, and Kristin Kuster. He holds degrees from the Peabody Conservatory (MM ’09) and the University of Southern California (BM ’07), and his previous teachers include Christopher Theofanidis, Derek Bermel, David Smooke, Donald Crockett, Tamar Diesendruck, Fredrick Lesemann, and Morten Lauridsen.

Phone

(255) 352-6258