Elinor Armer

Elinor Armer (born October 6, 1939) is an American pianist, music educator and composer.

Elinor Armer was born in Oakland, California but at the age of 2 months moved to Davis, California with her family where she would spend most of her childhood. Armer’s father worked as an engineer and worked for the Agricultural Engineering Department for the University in Davis, which prompted the family’s move. Her father was an acoustical engineer and used to set up speakers in the family’s living room, exposing Elinor to acoustics at a young age. Elinor first began sight-reading music and enjoying four-part harmony because of many hymnals found in the Armer home, due to her father’s Methodist Evangelist background.

Armer comes from a family of California artists, her grandfather was a commercial artist and her grandmother was an author. Her mother was a writer as well and who sang and played the piano. Elinor shared her love of piano with her mother; they frequently sang and played together throughout her childhood. Armer was eight years old when she began playing the piano

Though her mother played the piano also, Elinor was taught to play by a neighbor, Fritz Berens, who happened to be a piano teacher. Her early lessons focused on ear training and dictation. These early music lessons fostered her love and influenced her becoming a composer later in life.

Armer says that some of the major influences in her life include participating in a rhythm band when she was in kindergarten, the radio, and the records her siblings and parents would play around the house.

She studied music under Darius Milhaud and Leon Kirchner for composition and Alexander Libermann for piano. She attended Mills College, where she received a Bachelor of Arts in 1961, the University of California, Berkeley from 1966 to 1968, and California State University, San Francisco, where she received a Master of Arts degree in 1972. She teaches composition and chairs the department at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and has performed and lectured throughout the United States. She helped co-found the organization Composers, Inc. Her papers are housed at UC Berkeley Music Library.

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