BIOGRAPHY

Connecticut native Scott Perkins (b. 1980) is active as a composer, performer, scholar, and teacher of music. He holds degrees from Boston University and the Eastman School of Music in composition and music theory.

Scott’s music has been performed throughout North America and Europe, and has been commissioned by important artists such as David Higgs and Hans Davidsson, and organizations such as The Esoterics and the Eastman Chorale. His works have won international prizes, including a BMI Student Composer Award. Competition judges Donald Crockett, Richard Danielpour, Gunther Schuller, and Michael Torke described his winning work, A Word Out of the Sea, as “a dramatic and strikingly beautiful example of choral writing which speaks to the heart as well as to the mind.”

Scott is an accomplished tenor and conductor, specializing in early and contemporary music. He has enjoyed working with a long list of composers and giving the first performances of numerous works. He has appeared in recital and as a concert soloist in the United States, England, Mexico, Scotland, and Norway. As the music director and conductor of Kairos, a 12-voice, Rochester-based chamber vocal ensemble devoted to the performance of early and new music, he produced several concerts and read new works by student composers. During his tenure as president of Ossia, Eastman’s student-run new music ensemble, he supervised a successful concert season and instituted its first international composition competition, which received over sixty submissions from four continents. He also served as Ossia’s director of public relations for two years.

As a researcher, Scott is particularly interested in compositional process in the music of Benjamin Britten and issues in the pedagogy of music theory. In 2006, on a grant from Eastman, he conducted sketch studies at the Britten-Pears Library in Aldeburgh, England, for a second consecutive summer. His paper, “‘Voices of Boys’: The Influence of Britten’s Missa Brevis in D on his War Requiem,” won the New York State/St. Lawrence chapter of the American Musicological Society’s award for the best student paper presented at its 2008 meeting. Scott has also served on the board of the music theory journal Integrál, of which he was also the graphics editor.

Scott is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Composition at Eastman, where he studies with Ricardo Zohn-Muldoon. He is also Instructor of Music Theory and Composition at Nazareth College, and assistant director of the Christ Church Schola Cantorum, with which he performs weekly as a member.