Andrew Ager

Andrew Ager (born 12 February 1962) is a Canadian composer of symphonies, operas, chamber, and solo music. He lives in Ottawa, where he composes full-time. Early life Andrew Ager was born to a musical family. His maternal grandfather, Charles Aharan, was a professional musician during the early part of his life, and his parents and sisters all played piano. Ager commenced piano studies as a child and began composing seriously around age fourteen. He did not study music at school, but was an avid private piano and theory student in suburban Ottawa, winning several Ottawa Music Festival classes as a teenager. When he was fifteen the family moved to Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia, where Ager dropped out of school a year later and spent much time in a studio on their property studying music and literature on his own. 1990-2010 In the 1990s Ager began to write for larger ensembles and received numerous commissions while living in Halifax and Toronto. He felt that he had waited a certain period of time before doing this in order to “get it right” in terms of technique and structure. He was especially busy as a freelance pianist and composer in Toronto from 1993-2010, writing for many of Toronto