Gary Philo was born in Jersey City, New Jersey (1953), and grew up in Yorktown Heights, NY, studied trombone and guitar, and played in school orchestra, band, and folk and rock bands through high school. He attended Berklee College of Music, playing guitar and then later trombone and bass 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 MM. He then entered the DMA program at Columbia University, where his principal teachers were Mario Davidovsky, Jack Beeson, and Chou Wen-chung, and received a DMA from Columbia’s School of the Arts in 1992. His works have been performed by many groups, including Collage, the 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, Loadbang, the Guidonian Hand, 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, Lech Lecha, a sextet for flute, piano and string quartet, 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.
