Tom Schneller  

composer

German composer Tom Schneller was born in Africa in 1974, grew up in Europe and Asia, and studied in the U.S. and Great Britain. He holds a doctorate in composition from Cornell University, where he studied with Steven Stucky and Roberto Sierra, and a Masters degree in composition from the Cincinnati College-Conservatory. He also studied composition with Hugh Rice at Oxford University, England, and with George Tsontakis at Sarah Lawrence College.

Tom has composed numerous orchestral, chamber and solo works as well as a number of scores for film and theatre productions. His works are marked by an expressive and evocative musical language that often derives inspiration from literary or visual sources. His compositions have been performed by ensembles such as eighth blackbird, the Cornell Contemporary Chamber Players, and Tabula Rasa, and have been programmed at music festivals such as Aspen, Bowdoin, Apple Hill, MUSIC 2000, and the 2001 Festival of Contemporary German Music in Cincinnati. He is a winner of the Robert Black Memorial Competition of the New Amsterdam Symphony Orchestra, for which he wrote his orchestral work Symphonic Ode, premiered during the 2005/06 concert season of the NASO at Symphony Space in New York City. Symphonic Ode was also read by the Buffalo Philharmonic at the 2006 Buffalo Philharmonic Young Composers Forum. Other orchestral works include Magellan and Fanfare, performed by the CCM Philharmonia under Mark Gibson, and In Memory, which was commissioned in 2006 by the Binghamton Community Orchestra, conducted by Cayenna Ponchione, and performed again in the spring of 2007 by the Grassroots Festival Orchestra in Trumansburg, NY. He just completed a commission for the Holland Symphony Orchestra in Michigan, to be premiered by conductor Johannes Müller-Stosch in April 2010. His works for chamber orchestra have been performed by the Festival Chamber Orchestra at Cornell University, conducted by Steven Stucky and Chris Kim, and his piano music has been played by pianists such as Xak Bjerken, Bernard Rose, and Frédéric Lacroix. Among his awards are a Theodore Presser Award, the Harris Award for Composition given at Cornell University, and a nomination to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

In addition to his work as a concert composer, Tom has been active in film music as both composer and researcher. He has scored numerous films for student directors in Cincinnati, New York, Rochester, and Ithaca. These have included both live action and computer animation films, and the scoring has ranged from samples to sixteen-piece chamber orchestra. In addition, he has collaborated on several multimedia and theatre projects at Cornell, the scores of which combined live musicians and electronic music. Tom has participated in a number of film scoring workshops, including the 2004 NYU-ASCAP Film Scoring Workshop at NYU, the Pacific Northwest Film Scoring Program with Hummie Mann, and Steven Scott Smalley's workshop "Contemporary Orchestration for Film and Television." The focus of Tom's research has been Hollywood music of the 1950s and 60s, with a particular emphasis on the work of Bernard Herrmann. His dissertation is devoted to a detailed analysis of Herrmann's musical syntax. His article on Herrmann's score for Vertigo was published in 2004 in Cuadernos de música, artes visuales y artes escénicas, and he has published two book reviews in the current issue of The Journal of Film Music. His particular interest in classic film scores has led him to do extensive research in Syracuse University Special Collections, which houses manuscripts by Miklós Rózsa and Franz Waxman, and the Alexander Courage Collection at the Eastman School of Music, where he has studied scores by Hugo Friedhofer, John Williams, and Jerry Goldsmith.

At the university level, Tom has ten years of teaching experience. At Cornell, he has taught beginning through advanced music theory courses, as well as a Freshman Writing Seminar in German Studies ("Fairy Tales and the Romantic Imagination: From the Brothers Grimm to Edgar Allan Poe") for the John S. Knight Institute. In 2006, he was hired at the level of associate professor by Ithaca College as a sabbatical replacement, where he taught two lectures in music history: "Survey of Music History I: Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque" and "Survey of Music History III: Twentieth-Century Music." Additional teaching experience includes a year-long music history survey course (18th through 20th centuries) at the Cincinnati College-Conservatory of music, as well as private lessons in composition. As a teaching assistant at Cornell, he taught a variety of undergraduate music history and theory courses. These include sections for Neal Zaslaw's survey course "Monteverdi to Minimalism" and James Webster's "Introduction to Music Theory," as well as courses in Jazz, Rock, and Music of the African Diaspora. Tom is currently teaching music theory at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY, where he lives with his wife Lenora, his two sons, Theo and Julian, and his poodle Nino.

Read a NASO interview with Tom Schneller →