Gary
Philo was born in Jersey City, New Jersey, living first in Brooklyn, NY as a little kid, and then in Yorktown Heights, NY. He learned to play trombone and guitar, playing in school orchestra and band, as well as folk and rock bands through high school. After a year at New England College in New Hampshire, he moved to Boston and attended Berklee College of Music, playing guitar, and then later trombone in small and large jazz groups, while studying composition privately with William Thomas McKinley. After receiving his BM from Berklee, he attended the New England Conservatory of Music, where he continued his studies with McKinley, and received a Masters in Music. After teaching for a couple of years at Regis College, he entered the DMA program at Columbia University, where his principal teachers were Mario
Davidovsky, Jack Beeson, and Chou Wen-chung. He received his DMA from Columbia's School of the Arts in 1992.
His works have been performed by many groups, including Loadbang, the Guidonian Hand, Collage, Pro
Arte Chamber Orchestra of Boston, the Vermont
Philharmonic, the Silesian
Philharmonic (Poland), the Washington Square Contemporary
Music Series Players, James
Dunham, Nicholas
Underhill, The Cleveland Chamber Collective, Mary Rowell, Marlow Fisher, and others. He is a recipient of a Charles Ives Scholarship, awarded by
the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, has been commissioned
by the National Endowment for the Arts, and has
received grants from Meet-the-Composer and CAP. He has also received fellowships
to the Tanglewood Music Center where he studied with Hans Werner Henze, and the Composers
Conference at Wellesley. Recordings include Spring Music for orchestra, available on MMC
Recordings, his sextet Lech Lecha, recorded by the Cleveland Chamber Collective, and Three Pieces for Piano, recorded by Nicholas Underhill and available on Capstone Records. Mr. Philo serves on the board of the League of Composers/ISCM,
is a member of the American Composers
Alliance and BMI, and was a founding
member of Composers
in Red Sneakers, a Boston-based composers cooperative that produces
concerts of their works and the works of other composers.
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