Biography
Peter Boyer was born in Providence, Rhode Island in 1970. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Rhode Island College, and Master of Music and Doctor of Musical Arts degrees from The Hartt School of the University of Hartford. He then studied privately with composer John Corigliano in New York, and moved to Los Angeles to study film/TV scoring at USC, where his teachers included Elmer Bernstein.
To date, Boyer has worked primarily as an orchestral composer for the concert hall, where he has enjoyed much success. His orchestral works have received some 400 public performances, by more than 125 orchestras. He has conducted recordings of his music with three of the world's finest orchestras: the London Symphony Orchestra, the Philharmonia, and the London Philharmonic Orchestra. His concert works have received thousands of broadcasts on classical radio stations throughout the U.S., and in many countries abroad. He has received seven national awards for his work.
Boyer was chosen by conductor Keith Lockhart for the Boston Pops 125th anniversary commission honoring the legacy of John, Robert, and Ted Kennedy. Acclaimed actors Robert De Niro, Morgan Freeman, and Ed Harris narrated the premiere of Boyer's "The Dream Lives On: A Portrait of the Kennedy Brothers", which was attended by many members of the Kennedy family, and received extensive national media attention. Boyer's work was the focus of the TV special "An American Salute: the Pops at 125." The Boston Pops also performed "Kennedy Brothers" at the Tanglewood Music Festival with narrator Alec Baldwin.
Boyer's major work "Ellis Island: The Dream of America" for actors and orchestra, which celebrates the historic American immigrant experience, has been his most successful composition to date. Premiered in 2002, the work has received over 160 live performances by 70 orchestras, making it one of the most-performed large-scale American classical works of the last decade. Boyer's recording of this work was released by Naxos in 2005, and was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Classical Contemporary Composition.
In addition to his work for the concert hall, Boyer is active in the film and television music industry. In recent years, his skills as an orchestrator (one who works from composers' sketches and demos to create complete orchestral scores for recording) have been increasingly in demand. Boyer has contributed orchestrations to film scores by many top Hollywood composers, such as Michael Giacchino, Thomas Newman, James Newton Howard, James Horner, Alan Menken, Mark Isham, Harry Gregson-Williams, and Heitor Pereira, among others. Boyer has also composed scores for The History Channel, the A&E Networks Production Music Library, and several short films, and has arranged music for the Academy Awards.
