Elliott Gyger
Elliott Gyger, BMus (Syd), PhD (Harvard)
Elliott Gyger was born in Sydney, Australia, in 1968, and began writing music at about the age of ten. His composition teachers have included Ross Edwards, Peter Sculthorpe, Bernard Rands and Mario Davidovsky. He holds a Bachelor of Music from the University of Sydney (1990) and a Ph.D. in Music from Harvard University (2002). He has lived in Boston, Massachusetts, since 1996.
Elliott has participated in numerous composition schools and workshops, working with such composers as Anne Boyd, Barry Conyngham, Roger Smalley, Oliver Knussen, Simon Bainbridge, Andrew Imbrie and Franco Donatoni. He attended Australia's National Orchestral Composers' School in 1990 and 1993, and the Wellesley Composers' Conference in 2000. He was the Australian representative at FORUM 96 in Montréal. Awards have included the Peggy Glanville-Hicks Fellowship, the Walter Hinrichsen Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and commission grants from the Australia Council and the Fromm Foundation. He was in residence at La Mortella on Ischia for the month of July 2003, as the inaugural Harvard-Walton Fellow.
Elliott's music has been played by many of Australia's major performing groups, including the Australia Ensemble, Sydney Alpha Ensemble, the Song Company, Sydney Philharmonia Choirs, Halcyon, and the Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Tasmanian Symphony Orchestras, as well as North American groups such as the Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, the New York New Music Ensemble, Columbia Sinfonietta, Collage, and the Emerson, Mendelssohn and Ying Quartets. His work has been heard at the Sonic Boom Festival and the Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music. 25 Songs, a collaborative work with visual artist Joe Felber for which he created a 21-minute "score" for prerecorded voices, has been exhibited in major galleries in Sydney, Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne and Singapore. Recent premieres have included Soli (2003), for the Ying Quartet; Temptation in the Desert (2005), for Boston's Seraphim Singers; and From the Hungry Waiting Country (2006), for Halcyon, which was highly commended in the 2006 Paul Lowin Song Cycle Award. He is currently working on a piece for two choral groups in San Francisco (Volti and the Piedmont Children's Choir), as well as a work for the New York Percussion Quartet. Two CDs of his music are in preparation: one of sacred choral works on the Boston-based Arsis label; and one of ensemble music on ABC Classics.
In addition to his work as a composer, Elliott Gyger is active as a performer, teacher, curator, and writer on music. He was a founding member and co-director of the Contemporary Singers, a Sydney chamber choir devoted exclusively to new music. Recent events he has curated include a festival in honour of Nigel Butterley's 70th birthday; concerts featuring the music of Sir Harrison Birtwistle, Julian Anderson and Joshua Fineberg; and symposium collaborations with the Boston Symphony Orchestra on Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 and Schoenberg's opera Moses und Aron. He is currently Assistant Professor of Music at Harvard.