Evan Fein

American composer Evan Fein was born in Cleveland, Ohio and currently resides in New York City, where he serves on the faculty of The Juilliard School Pre-College and Evening Divisions. His music has been widely performed at home and abroad — including in France, Germany, China, Iceland, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands — and has been commissioned by organizations including Musica Sacra, Opéra de Poche, The Albany Symphony, The Juilliard School, and The New York Choreographic Institute. He was awarded the Palmer Dixon Prize for Outstanding Composition, is the recipient of honors from the ASCAP Foundation, Boston Metro Opera, and the American Scandinavian Society, and additionally serves as Chair of the Music Committee for the Board of Trustees of the Oratorio Society of New York.

Evan Fein has served as Composer-in-Residence (Artiste Associé) for the Paris-based chamber opera troupe Opéra de Poche since 2012. His first opera, The Raven’s Kiss, based on Icelandic folk stories, was premiered in concert at Juilliard in 2011. His second, L’Île des sept sœurs, a Southern Gothic tale, was given its premiere in Paris in 2013 by Opéra de Poche. City of Ashes, which follows the stories of two German women in the days immediately following the fall of Berlin in 1945, was presented by Opéra de Poche in 2015 in Paris and again in Beijing in 2016. His major work for chorus and orchestra, Deborah, an oratorio based on the Book of Judges, was premiered by Musica Sacra at Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center in 2016.

Evan Fein holds a Doctorate of Musical Arts and a Master of Music from The Juilliard School and a Bachelor of Music from the Cleveland Institute of Music. In addition, he pursued auxiliary studies at the Freie Universität Berlin (FUBiS) and L’École Normale de Musique de Paris (EAMA). His primary teachers included Robert Beaser, Samuel Adler, Michel Merlet, and Margaret Brouwer.

His dissertation “The Ghosts of Versailles” by John Corigliano: An Evolutionary Study was completed in 2014. The first comprehensive study of the work commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera for its centennial, it is now available to scholars around the world.