grew up in Rushford, Minnesota and attended St. Mary's
University of Minnesota from 1989 to 1992. Thereafter he enrolled at the
Oberlin Conservatory of Music to study piano with Joseph Schwartz and
composition with Param Vir and Randolph Coleman. As recipient of the
Theodore Presser Music Award, he pursued a six-month program of language,
culture, and musical study at Yonsei University in South Korea in 1995. He
graduated from Oberlin in 1997 with awards in both composition and
accompanying.
National recognition for his composition work has included the BMI Student
Composer Awards (1991, 1994), the ASCAP Foundation Morton Gould Young
Composer Awards (1997), and the San Francisco State University Wayne
Peterson Composition Prize (1999). In the summer of 1998, he attended the
Yale Music School's Norfolk Chamber Music Festival and the Dartington
International Summer School in England. His orchestral work leaping
greenly spirits was commissioned and performed by the Minnesota Orchestra
under Eiji Oue in January 1999. As a winner of the 1999 Aaron Copland
Awards, he spent a month last spring in residence at the Copland House in
Westchester County, New York. Recent works include Empty Shells for
violinist Gregory Fulkerson's Merkin Hall recital and a Naumburg Foundation
commission for the Mirs String Quartet's Alice Tully Hall dibut. Schober's
current project is a concerto for the ensemble eighth blackbird, which has
given more than thirty performances of his Variations for Sextet in tours
across the U.S. and Korea.
Currently a doctoral fellow at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor,
Schober has studied composition with Bright Sheng, William Bolcom, Michael
Daugherty, Susan Botti, Evan Chambers, and William Albright and piano with
Logan Skelton.
NOTES ON
Empty Shells
During the six months I studied in Korea in 1995, I was struck by the
industrious spirit and optimism of a nation with such a tragic history of
political division and war. Similar impressions arose from a more recent
visit to central Europe, where symbols of conflict and reconciliation can
be observed side by side. The multiple meanings of "empty shells" include
connotations of mystery, beauty, violence, and loss - experiences shared by
resilient people from many cultures.
- David Schober
David Schober
1124 Nielsen Court #5
Ann Arbor, Michigan 48105-1963 USA
e-mail: dschober@umich.edu
Tel. (734) 747-8162