ABOUT COMPOSER ADAM B. SILVERMAN

ADAM SILVERMAN (born 1973) is a composer whose works have been commissioned and performed by The New York City Opera, Eighth Blackbird, The Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra, The Brooklyn Symphony, The Albany Symphony Chamber Orchestra, The Amelia Piano Trio, The Corigliano Quartet, The Flux Quartet, Prism Saxophone Quartet, Relâche, Opera Company of Brooklyn, Real Time Opera, The Yale Philharmonic, and others. His works have been performed at venues including Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, The Kennedy Center, The Library of Congress, The Metropolitan Museum, La Jolla Chamber Music Society, and The Spoleto Festival.

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Silverman’s works include classical concert works (the piano trio “Sturm” and three string quartets), rock-based music for live performers and electronics (“Strawberry Fields Continued” for percussion, cellos, and recording), opera (“Korczak’s Orphans”), conceptual music-theater (“Telemusic” for phones and percussion and “The Mostly True Story of Professor Leon and Me”) and educational music as composer-in-residence for The Commission Project.

Silverman’s music often incorporates theatrical elements, and his opera-in-progress “Korczak’s Orphans” was recently featured in a showcase by the New York City Opera, performed by their orchestra and soloists under the baton of NYCO’s Music Director George Manahan. Another work, “In Another Man’s Skin,” was performed dozens of times across the country throughout 2001-2003 by Eighth Blackbird, who memorized and staged the work with choreography that accentuated musical elements. Based on a text from Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, Silverman’s “stars, cars, bars” has been performed recently on tour throughout Australia, and in New York as the closing piece of the “Say What” Festival by Music Journeys, Inc. In 2005, he composed music for inParenthesis Theater’s production of Olivier Cadiot’s “AWOL” (“Le Colonel des Zouaves”), for solo actor and 20-member men’s chorus.

Since 1998, he has directed the Minimum Security Composers Collective, a group of which he is co-founder. Dedicated to the presentation of new music, Minimum Security has worked with over a dozen ensembles in the creation of new music by the four Minimum Security directors and guests, with more than eighty works so far presented by thirty-three composers. With this group, Silverman has created the Minimum Security Ensemble, the “Di/verge” tour, “Maurice Sendak Music,” has participated in outreach events at Centro Musica in Modena, Italy, in Iowa through the Chamber Music America/NEA Rural Music Residencies program, at the Norfolk Music Festival, the Juilliard School, and Northwestern University.

Silverman has received residencies, fellowships and grants from The Tanglewood Music Center (ASCAP-Leonard Bernstein fellowship), Yaddo, MacDowell Colony, American Music Center, The Argosy Foundation, Yvar Mikhashoff Trust for New Music, Atlantic Center for the Arts, Bowdoin Music Festival, The Commission Project, Yale School of Music, and Kunsthalle Krems (Austria).

Silverman studied composition at Yale (Doctor of Musical Arts, 2003), the Vienna Musikhochschule, and the University of Miami School of Music with Martin Bresnick, Anthony Davis, Ben Johnston, Ezra Laderman, Ned Rorem, Kurt Schwertsik, and Evan Ziporyn, and at festivals with Louis Andriessen, Chen Yi, and Osvaldo Golijov. From 2004-2006, he taught music at City University of New York, and currently serves as Assistant Professor of Music Theory and Composition at West Chester University in Pennsylvania.

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updated July, 2007