Paul Chihara | |
---|---|
Birth name | Paul Seiko Chihara |
Born |
Seattle, Washington, United States |
July 9, 1938
Genres | Film score |
Occupation(s) | Composer |
Paul Seiko Chihara (born July 9, 1938) is an American composer.
Chihara was born in Seattle, Washington in 1938. A Japanese American, he spent three years of his childhood with his family in an internment camp in Minidoka, Idaho.
Chihara received a BA and an MA in English literature from the University of Washington and Cornell University, respectively. He received a DMA in 1965 from Cornell, studying with Robert Palmer. He also studied composition with Nadia Boulanger in Paris, Ernst Pepping in West Berlin, and Gunther Schuller in Tanglewood.
He was the first composer-in-residence of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Neville Marriner, and was most recently part of the music faculty of UCLA, where he was the head of the Visual Media Program. As of 2015[update], Chihara is on the faculty of New York University as an Artist Faculty in Film Music.
Chihara's prize-winning concert works, which include symphonies, concertos, chamber music, choral compositions, and ballets, have been performed to great acclaim both nationally and internationally. His works are concerned with the evolution and expression of highly contrasting colors, textures, and emotional levels, which are often dramatically juxtaposed with one another.
His works have been commissioned by the Guggenheim Foundation, the Roger Wagner Chorale, the Naumberg Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He has also received commissions from the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the London Symphony, as well as the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Cleveland Orchestra. He was Composer-in-Residence with the San Francisco Ballet for ten years. Tempest and Shinju are among his well-known ballet scores.