Cary Boyce bio (updated 7-4-2022)
Cary Boyce is an Emmy Award-winning composer, musician, and producer whose music has been featured in the United States in concerts, festivals, film, radio, and television including NPR and PBS, and internationally on the BBC, Deutsche Welle, and France 3 television. Boyce’s credits include music for two films by Prix-de-Rome-winning director Evelyne Clavaud, as well as original music for the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) documentaries American Horizons: The Photography of Art Sinsabaugh (2008) and Harp Dreams (2008) which won three Emmy Awards in 2011, including Original Music.
Numerous grants and awards include Arts International, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Pew Charitable Trusts, the Indiana Arts Commission, and Humanities Washington. In 2006 he was awarded an ASCAP Rudolf Nissim “Special Distinction” Award for his oratorio Dreams within a Dream which was commissioned and premiered with the Bloomington Chamber Singers in 2003. He is one of eight composers commissioned to set The Vonnegut Requiem, (1. Requiem Aeternam) which premiered at the Granfalloon Conference at Indiana University Bloomington in 2019.
Boyce earned a doctorate in music composition (DM) at Indiana University Bloomington. During his studies, Boyce taught all levels of music theory and skills as a teaching fellow at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, where he also developed and taught “Music in Culture,” possibly the first interdisciplinary music course at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music; and subsequently he served as adjunct professor (composition) of music at Whitworth University in Spokane from 2028 to 2024.
Boyce has been an active participant in diverse artistic and musical outreach endeavors of his community, not only as a composer, but also as a producer and music essayist with public radio, online journals, major orchestras, and community presses. The music of Cary Boyce is published by G. Schirmer, Boosey & Hawkes, and by Aguavá New Music Studio.
In his spare time, Dr Boyce was the president and CEO of Spokane Public Radio, a small public media network in the Pacific Northwest, from 2012 to 2024; and he previously served as the permanently-interim station manager at WFIU Bloomington, where he was the producer and executive producer of several nationally syndicated public radio programs and specials. He remains active as a tenor, pianist, conductor and producer as well.
Boyce was born in Santa Rosa, California. He earned a doctorate in composition (DM, 1994) at Indiana University Bloomington, studying composition with Claude Baker, piano with Asaf Zohar, and conducting with Jan Harrington and Robert Porco. He took his Master of Music degree at University of North Texas while studying composition with Martin Mailman, piano with Joseph Banowetz, and conducting with HenryGibbons. He studied at California State University, Sacramento where he studied composition with Robert Aichele, piano with Frank Wasko and Tom Hulse, and voice with Claudia Kitka.
“A Garden of Roses is important because it’s good in every way music can be good, and it can provide pleasure to audiences of every age, cultural background and level of sophistication …”
—The Spokesman Review
“Fluent and creative.”
—Washington Post
“Such perfection! … A concert not to be missed.”
—Ha’aretz
“Lush vocal polyphony and his careful control of harmony enable this work to stand alongside the very best music in this vein.”
—American Record Guide
“A formidable composer whose technique and lyric gifts are exceptional.”
—John Corigliano, Composer, New York
“Dreams within a Dream, Boyce’s new oratorio commissioned and performed by the Bloomington Chamber Singers is…an honest, inspired, and deftly crafted work, one of scope; of carefully designed, satisfying, back-and-forth shifts from tension to relief; of musical elements fitting poetic content; of artistic worth.”
—Bloomington Herald-Times
“Three extraordinary pieces by American composer Cary Boyce …compare and contrast quite favorably with spiritualists/minimalists Pärt and Tavener. Noche oscura is a haunting setting of words by the Spanish monk and mystic St. John of the Cross, and its bittersweet intensity lingers long after the melody has faded. Boyce’s setting of the Marian Ave Maria is as close to a masterpiece as you can come in four minutes. Nightshade is for classical music fans who know where Freddy the Freeloader comes from…Hey MacArthur folks! Give that boy a grant and some Ritalin so he can spend more time composing!”
—Sequenza 21
“It’s wonderful, clear, evocative music, all of it, and the performances are beautiful. There is a timeless flow that comes through in each work and I found myself settling in to listen … a neo-renaissance feel that clearly takes acoustic space into consideration as a compositional element. It’s very striking.”
—Libby Larsen, Composer
“[The Ave Maria is] A stunning work, absolutely marvelous.”
—Dale Warland, Conductor, Minneapolis
“Refined, full of creativity and imagination.”
—Mario Lavista, Composer, National Conservatory of Music, Mexico City
“A soaring, effulgent voice all his own.”
Bloomington Herald-Times
“Tender and beautiful.”
—Sacramento Bee
