(This composer has multiple commissions - click here to view all)

Title: Being in Life
Commission: 2018
Completed: 2019
Instrumentation: French horn and Alpenhorn, five Tibetan singing bowls, and string orchestra
Premiere Location: October 6, 2019 at St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, WA
Premiere Ensemble: Philharmonia Northwest, Ann Ellsworth, horns and Julia Tai, conductor
Notes:

Title: Canto
Commission:
Completed: 1979
Instrumentation: baritone and chamber ensemble
Premiere Location: Tanglewood Music Center, MA
Premiere Ensemble:
Notes:

Sheila Silver’s (b. 1946, Seattle) compositions have been commissioned and performed internationally. Recent honors for her current opera based on Khaled Hosseini’s international best-selling novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns, include: a 2014 Opera America Discovery Grant for Female Composers, funded by the Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation; selection in Opera America’s 2016 New Works Forum and New Works Showcase concert; a 2015 NEA Opera Development grant through American Opera Projects; a 2013 Guggenheim Fellowship; and a 2016 NYSCA Commission Award.

Other honors include the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Prize in Opera; Bunting Institute Fellowship; Rome Prize; Prix de Paris, American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Composer Award; twice winner of the ISCM National Composers Competition; and awards and commissions from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Camargo Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, New York State Council of the Arts, the Barlow Foundation, the Paul Fromm Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Cary Trust. 

Sheila recently returned from her third trip to India where she studies Hindustani music with Pandit Kedar Narayan Bodas. Silver is incorporating an authentic Hindustani color into her score for A Thousand Splendid Suns. 

Silver lives in Spencertown, New York, with her husband, filmmaker John Feldman, and their 18 year old son, Victor Feldman, who is now a Freshman at Brandeis University. She is Professor of Music at the State University of New York, Stony Brook. Her music is published by Lauren Keiser Music, Studio 4 Productions, and Argenta Music and is recorded on various labels. Her teachers include Gyorgy Ligeti, Arthur Berger, Harold Shapero, and Erhard Karkosckha.