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Emmy Award winning composer Steve Heitzeg (b. 1959) is known for his orchestral
and chamber works written in celebration of the natural world, with evocative
and lyrical scores frequently including naturally-found instruments, such
as stones, birch bark wind chimes, acorns, bones, sea glass shards and
shells.
Heitzeg’s music has been performed by the Atlanta Symphony,
Chanticleer, Dale Warland Singers, Detroit Symphony, Minnesota
Orchestra, Plymouth Music Ensemble Singers and The Philadelphia
Orchestra, among others. Marin Alsop, William Eddins, JoAnn Falletta,
Jahja Ling, Lawrence Renes, Christopher Seaman, and Joseph
Silverstein are among the conductors who have led his works. The
recipient of a 2001 McKnight Fellowship, he has also received
commissions and grants from the American Composers Forum, Meet
The Composer, the Walker Art Center and the Jerome Foundation. In
addition to concert and film music, Heitzeg composes ecoscores
(intimate works with inventive musical syntax) that seek to honor the
beauty and rights of nature.
Heitzeg received recognition with his score for PBS' A
Marriage: Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz
( starring Jane Alexander) in 1991 and for the award winning children's
video On the Day You Were Born, released by the Minnesota Orchestra in
1996. He has addressed social and environmental justice issues with vision
and compassion, in such works as Aqua
(Hommage á Jacques-Yves Cousteau), Blessed Are the Peacemakers,
Endangered, Voice
of the Everglades (Epitaph for Majority Stoneman Douglas)
and Nobel Symphony.
Heitzeg's debut recording earthworks: music in honor of nature was released
in April 1998. Most recently, he received a regional Emmy for his original
score for the public television documentary Death of the Dream: Farmhouses
in the Heartland. Heitzeg received his Ph.D. in music composition from
the University of Minnesota, studying with Dominick Argento, and completed
undergraduate work at Gustavus Adolphus College. Heitzeg grew up on a
dairy farm in southern Minnesota. He lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota with
his wife Gwendolyn.
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Copyright 2002 The Philadelphia Orchestra
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