Roger Zare

Roger Joseph Zare (born 1985 Sarasota, Florida) is an award-winning American composer and pianist. He is known primarily for his orchestral works, several of which have received significant recognition in the contemporary music community.

Life

Zare received his BM from the USC Thornton School of Music in 2007 and his MM from the Peabody Conservatory in 2009. In 2005, while studying under Tamar Diesendruck at USC, Zare won the New York Youth Symphony's 65th annual First Music commission and was the youngest composer in the foundation's history to receive that honor, marking the beginning of Zare's professional career. For the group Zare wrote The Other Rainbow, which was premiered in Carnegie Hall in 2006. Later that year, his 2004 orchestral piece Fog was performed by the Sarasota Orchestra, and its previous premiere with the USC Starving Composers' Ensemble under the baton of Geoffrey Pope was broadcast on KUSC.

In 2007, Zare's career-establishing work Green Flash was premiered at USC under the baton of composer and conductor Donald Crockett. Green Flash received a reading with the 2008 American Composers Orchestra Underwood Readings, conducted by Anne Manson, and Zare subsequently won the workshop's 2008 Underwood Commission. Green Flash also received ASCAP's 2009 Rudolf Nissim Prize, and BMI's prestigious student composer award in 2007. Zare received another BMI award for Aerodynamics in 2009. Also in 2007, Zare was invited to the USC Thornton Wind Ensemble's performance of Lift-Off, a work that has been performed in various instrumental configurations, conducted by the legendary H. Robert Reynolds.

Zare's teachers have included Christopher Theofanidis, Tamar Diesendruck, Derek Bermel, Donald Crockett, Morten Lauridsen and Frederick Lesemann. Juilliard faculty member and Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Christopher Rouse wrote in 2009 that:

Roger Zare writes for orchestra like a real natural. It's a medium that seems to be in his blood.

Zare has had performances of his works by the Sarasota Orchestra, the SONAR new music ensemble, the Santa Monica Symphony Wind Quintet, the Pine View Chamber Orchestra and Chorus, in addition to various groups in Los Angeles, Baltimore, and at Florida's Sarasota Music Festival.

In April 2009, Zare was accepted to the University of Michigan's composition program and will begin his doctoral studies with Michael Daugherty. In 2010, he was awarded a Charles Ives Prize.

External links

• Roger Zare's page at Theodore Presser Company
• [1] Composer's website
• [2] American Composers Orchestra
• [3] Composer's biography