Stephen Albert

Stephen Albert (6 February 1941 – 27 December 1992) was an American composer.

Born in New York City, Albert began his musical training on the piano, French horn, and trumpet as a youngster. He first studied composition at the age of 15 with Elie Siegmeister, and enrolled two years later at the Eastman School of Music, where he studied with Bernard Rogers. Following composition lessons in with Karl-Birger Blomdahl, Albert studied with Joseph Castaldo at the Philadelphia Musical Academy (BM 1962); in 1963 he worked with George Rochberg at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1965 he won a Rome Fellowship to study in Rome at the American Academy.

From 1985 to 1988 he worked as the Seattle Symphony's composer-in-residence.

His notable students included Daniel Asia.

Albert was killed in an automobile accident on Cape Cod on December 27, 1992.

Stephen Albert won the 1985 Pulitzer Prize for Music for his Symphony No. 1, RiverRun. He posthumously won a Grammy Award in 1995 in the Best Classical Contemporary Composition category for his Cello Concerto as performed by Yo-Yo Ma in a 1990 recording with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, conducted by David Zinman.

Aaron Jay Kernis dedicated his 1993 composition for piano quartet Still Movement with Hymn in memory of Albert. The slow movement of Christopher Rouse's 1994 Symphony No. 2 is also dedicated to the memory of Albert, who was a colleague and close friend of Rouse.