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 is currently completing a doctorate in composition with Steven Stucky and Roberto Sierra at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. He holds a Masters degree in composition from the Cincinnati College-Conservatory in Ohio, and a BA from Sarah Lawrence College, New York. He has also studied music history with Karen Henson and composition with Hugh Rice at Oxford University, England.

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 a highly expressive, accessible and evocative musical language that often derives inspiration from literary or visual sources. His compositions have been performed by ensembles such as the CCM Philharmonia, eighth blackbird and the ACME Ensemble, and were programmed at international music festivals such as Aspen, Bowdoin, Apple Hill, MUSIC 2000, the 2001 Festival of Contemporary German Music in Cincinnati, as well as at concerts at the Juilliard School in New York. 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. 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 participated in a number of film scoring workshops, including the 2004 NYU-ASCAP Film Scoring Workshop, the Pacific Northwest Film Scoring Program, and Steven Scott Smalley's workshop "Contemporary Orchestration for Film and Television." Among the student films he has scored are the award-winning film Eastern Standard Time, which received the 2001 Student Emmy Award from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. The subject of his dissertation is a comprehensive analysis of Bernard Herrmann's score for the 1964 Hitchcock film Marnie. His article on Bernard Herrmann's score for Vertigo was published in 2005 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 eight years of teaching experience. Most recently, he has taught tonal and post-tonal music theory at Cornell University. At Ithaca College, he lectured in music history ("Survey of Music History I: Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque" and "Survey of Music History III: Twentieth-Century Music.") As a teaching assistant, Tom has taught a variety of undergraduate music history and theory courses at Cornell. 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. At Cornell, he also taught 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. 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.

Read a NASO interview with Tom Schneller →