Stony Brook Music Professor Wins Sackler Prize

STONY BROOK, N.Y. — Composer Sheila Silver, Professor of Music at Stony Brook, was named the recipient of the sixth Raymond and Beverly Sackler Music Composition Prize. The purpose of the competition, organized by the School of Fine Arts at the University of Connecticut, is to support composers to create new musical works.

“The prize is part of a broader structure promoting innovation, inventiveness and the creative spirit within the School of Fine Arts,” said David G. Woods, Dean of the school. “It provides the opportunity for cutting-edge creative exploration and productivity, and will reflect the essence of creativity in the artistic program of the school.”

The competition is an annual event rotating among specific areas of the musical arts, with this year’s prize being in the area of Chamber Opera. The international award offers recognition including public performances, recordings, and $20,000. Silver was chosen from among 85 entries from 11 countries and 28 states.

Silver’s winning opera proposal, The Wooden Sword, tells the story of a poor man whose joyful approach to living is put to the test by his powerful king. The man triumphs through wit, resourcefulness, and faith. Based on a fourteenth-century tale from Afghanistan, the music will be lyrical with exotic oriental touches, and will range from dramatic to comic.

Silver is an important and vital voice in American music today. She has written in a wide range of mediums: from solo instrumental works to large orchestral works; from opera to feature film scores. Her musical language is a unique synthesis of the tonal and atonal worlds, coupled with a rhythmic complexity which is both masterful and compelling. Again and again, audiences and critics praise her music as powerful and emotionally charged, accessible, and masterfully conceived. “Only a few composers in any generation enliven the art form with their musical language and herald new directions in music. Sheila Silver is such a visionary.” (Wetterauer Zeitung, Germany, 2004).

Sheila Silver's compositions have been commissioned and performed by numerous orchestras, chamber ensembles, and soloists throughout the United States and Europe. Recent recordings, both on the Naxos label, include her Piano Concerto and Six Preludes for Piano on poems of Baudelaire, with Alexander Paley, piano, and the Lithuanian State Symphony Orchestra, Gintaras Rinkevicius, conductor; and her Shirat Sara (Song of Sarah) with Gerard Schwarz and the Seattle Symphony Strings.

She has received numerous honors including: a Bunting Institute Fellowship; the Rome Prize; the 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 (Bellagio Residency), 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.

Born in Seattle, Washington, Silver began piano studies at the age of five. She earned her BA from the University of California at Berkeley in 1968. Upon graduation, she went to study in Europe for two years after receiving the coveted George Ladd Prix de Paris and later earned her doctorate from Brandeis University. Her studies also included an Abraham Sachar Traveling Grant which enabled her to spend 18 months in London and a Koussevitzky Fellowship for a summer at the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood.

Silver now lives in Spencertown, New York, with her husband, film writer and director, John Feldman, and their 9 year old son, Victor Feldman. Her music is published by MMB Music, Studio 4 Productions, and Argenta Music, and is recorded on various labels.