Harold Meltzer

Harold Meltzer (June 8, 1966 – August 12, 2024) was an American composer. Meltzer was inspired by a wide variety of stimuli, from architectural spaces to postmodern fairy tales and messages inscribed in fortune cookies. In Fanfare Magazine, Robert Carl commented that he “seems to write pieces of scrupulous craft and exceptional freshness, which makes each seem like an important contribution.” The first recording devoted to his music, released in 2010 by Naxos on its American Classics label, was named one of the CDs of the year in The New York Times and in Fanfare; new all-Meltzer recordings issued from Open G Records (2017), Bridge Records (2018), and BMOP/Sound (2019). A Pulitzer Prize Finalist in 2009 for his sextet Brion, Meltzer has been awarded the Rome Prize, the Barlow Prize; a Guggenheim Fellowship, and both the Arts and Letters Award in Music and the Charles Ives Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Among his late works are Vision Machine (2016), commissioned by NewMusicUSA for the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra; Bride of the Island (2016), a song cycle to poems of Ted Hughes commissioned by the Minnesota Commissioning Club for tenor Paul Appleby and pianis