Steven Gerber

Steven Roy Gerber (September 28, 1948, in Washington, D. C. – May 28, 2015, in New York City) was an American composer of classical music. He attended Haverford College, graduating in 1969 at the age of twenty. He then attended Princeton University with a fellowship to study musical composition. Biography and career Steven Gerber’s works include the contrapuntal Fantasy for Solo Violin, which has been recorded on both the CRI and Naxos labels, and Piano Trio, commissioned by the Hans Kindler Foundation. His composition teachers included Robert Parris, James K. Randall, Earl Kim, and Milton Babbitt. His early works are in a free atonal style. During his years as a graduate student, he wrote serial and non-twelve-tone works, such as the a cappella choral works “Dylan Thomas Settings” and “Illuminations” (Rimbaud), and throughout the remainder of the 1970s most of his works were twelve-tone. Beginning in the early 1980s, he abandoned twelve-tone composition, with rare exceptions, and his music became much more tonal, for example in his Piano Sonata. Since then his music remained largely tonal, sometimes extremely chromatic, sometimes diatonic. His music has been reviewed in The New Yo