Sheila Silver

Sheila Jane Silver is an American composer born in Seattle on 3 October 1946. Her work, rooted in the Western tradition of the second half of the twentieth century, is distinguished by its incorporation of materials from other cultures and mythologies within a contemporary idiom.

Her training combined European and American institutions. She studied composition in Paris and in Stuttgart with Karkoschka and Ligeti, and later at Brandeis University with Arthur Berger, Shapero and Shifrin. Over the course of her career she received numerous prizes, fellowships and residencies, among them the Prix de Paris, the Prix de Rome, the Koussevitzky and Rockefeller fellowships, and an award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Debussy, Bartók and Stravinsky were probably decisive influences on her.

In 1979 she joined the State University of New York at Stony Brook as professor of composition. Her melodic sources are varied: classical Greek, Roman and Indian mythology, American jazz and Jewish chant. One critic has described her output as transcultural works in which elements such as Buddhist chant are integrated into textures of Western style.

Her allegorical opera The Thief of Love, from 1986, for which she also wrote the libretto, draws on a seventeenth-century Bengali tale adapted to the figure of the modern professional woman in search of the ideal man. The piano trio To the Spirit Unconquered, from 1992, reflects, in her own words, on the capacity of the human spirit to survive the most devastating circumstances, and is partly inspired by Primo Levi's writings on the Holocaust.

Her legacy lies above all in this combination of technical rigour and cultural openness. Her recordings have appeared on the CRI, Mode and Leonarda labels, and her music is published by MMB Music, Studio 4 Productions and Argenta Music.