Amy Williams (composer)

Amy Williams (born 1969) is an American composer and pianist. She was born in Buffalo, New York, into a musical family, with her mother, a violist with the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, and her father Jan Williams, percussionist and professor emeritus at the university at Buffalo. One of Williams’s most notable works is her ambitious Cineshape series of chamber pieces inspired by different films. This was presented in May 2016 with live performances by the JACK Quartet, flautist Lindsey Goodman and percussionist Scott Christian, with a new video component by Aaron Henderson. Education Williams began playing piano at the age of four and took up the flute a few years later with Robert Dick. Throughout her childhood, she was exposed to the latest contemporary music performed at the Center for the Creative and Performing Arts, meeting composers who would later become great influences on her own works, including John Cage, Morton Feldman, Lukas Foss and Elliott Carter. She made the decision to devote her life to performing and composing contemporary music whilst studying at Bennington College and after a fellowship year in Denmark, she completed a master’s degree in piano performance