Sheila 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. "Silver speaks a musical language of her own, one rich in sonority, lyrical intensity and poetic feeling." (Chicago Tribune)

Born in Seattle, Washington in 1946, Silver began piano studies at the age of five. Ms. Silver earned her Bachelor of Arts from the University of California at Berkeley in 1968 where she began composition studies with Edwin Dugger. Upon graduation she was awarded the coveted George Ladd Prix de Paris for two years study in Europe where she worked with Erhard Karkoscka in Stuttgart and Gyorgy Ligeti in Berlin and Hamburg. She earned her doctorate from Brandeis University where she studied with Arthur Berger, Harold Shapero, and Seymour Shifrin. 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 where she studied with Jacob Druckman.

Sheila Silver's compositions have been commissioned and performed by numerous orchestras, chamber ensembles, and soloists throughout the United States and Europe. Her honors include: 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. Last March her full length opera, The Thief of Love, was given its world premiere by the Stony Brook Opera Ensemble at the Staller Center for the Arts. This season, Silver's 47 minute Piano Concerto, written for Alexander Paley and premiered by him at Carnegie Hall in 1997, will be performed and recorded by the Lithuanian State Symphony Orchestra with Gintaras Rinkevicius conducting for Naxos.

Sheila Silver lives in Spencertown, New York with her husband, film writer and director, John Feldman, and their son, Victor. She is Professor of Music at the State University of New York, Stony Brook where she has been on the faculty since the Fall of 1979. In 1997 she was appointed Charles and Andrea Bronfman Distinguished Visiting Professor of Judaic Studies at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Va. Her music is published by MMB Music, Studio 4 Productions, and Argenta Music, and is recorded on various labels.