Adam Schoenberg

Biography

Emmy Award-winning and Grammy® nominated Adam Schoenberg (b, November 15, 1980) has twice been named among the top 10 most performed living composers by orchestras in the United States. His works have received performances and premieres at the Library of Congress, Kennedy Center, New York Philharmonic, The Cleveland Orchestra, Dallas Symphony Orchestra, and Hollywood Bowl.

Schoenberg has received commissions from several major American orchestras, including the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra (Up! and La Luna Azul), Kansas City Symphony (American Symphony and Picture Studies), Los Angeles Philharmonic and Aspen Music Festival and School (Bounce), and San Francisco Symphony (Losing Earth). Other recent commissions include works for Carlos Miguel Prieto and Orquesta Sinfónica de Minería and Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra, a violin concerto for Anne Akiko Meyers and the San Diego Symphony, Jerry Junkin and the University of Texas Wind Ensemble and Texas Performing Arts, and the first-ever two-piano concerto for the Dranoff International 2 Piano Foundation.

Adam Schoenberg received two 2018 Grammy® Award-nominations, including Best Contemporary Classical Composition for Picture Studies. He has been Composer-in-Residence with the Fort Worth Symphony (2015-17), Lexington Philharmonic (2013-14), Kansas City Symphony (2012-13), Blair School of Music at Vanderbilt University (2012) and the Aspen Music Festival & School’s M.O.R.E Music Program (2010-13). He won several awards, including ASCAP’s Morton Gould Young Composer Award for his orchestra work Finding Rothko, the Palmer-Dixon Prize from The Juilliard School and the Brian M. Israel Prize from the Society for New Music. Additionally, he received the Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts & Letters in 2006 and the MacDowell Fellowship in both 2009 and 2010.

An accomplished and versatile film composer, Schoenberg participated in the 2017 Sundance Composers Lab, and has scored two feature-length films and several shorts. Highlights include That Far Corner: Frank Lloyd Wright in Los Angeles (recipient of a 2019 Emmy award for Best Musical Composition), and Graceland, co-written with his father, Steven Schoenberg, which premiered at the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival and received its nationwide theatrical release in the spring of 2013. He also co-composed the new theme package for ABC’s NIGHTLINE.

A graduate of Oberlin Conservatory of Music, Schoenberg earned his Master’s and Doctor of Musical Arts degrees from The Juilliard School, where he studied with Robert Beaser and John Corigliano. He is currently a professor at Occidental College, where he runs the composition and film scoring programs. He makes his home in Los Angeles with his wife, screenwriter Janine Salinas Schoenberg, and their two sons, Luca and Leo.


Photo Credit: Elisa Ferrari