BIO

Evan Meier’s music has been featured in performances by the Minnesota Orchestra, New York City Opera, the Aspen Contemporary Ensemble, the Great Noise Ensemble, the Capital City Symphony, the Nimbus Ensemble, Nicholas Photinos of eighth blackbird, Paperwing Ensemble, the Calyx Quartet, the University of Maryland Percussion Ensemble, the Youth Orchestra of Prince William County, the McLean Youth Orchestra, and the Chapman University Wind Ensemble. Meier’s Fire Music was selected for the Minnesota Orchestra’s 2015 Composers Institute, and performed for the Future Classics program, with Osmo Vänskä conducting. 

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In 2022, Meier collaborated with Hip-hop artist Christylez Bacon to create Migrations in Rhythm, a Concerto for Beatbox and Rhyme. The work was commissioned by John Devlin, music director of the Wheeling Symphony Orchestra. Migrations provides a musical setting for Bacon’s virtuosic rhythmic explorations in the styles of Hip-hop, Agbadza, ring shout, rumba, New Orleans jazz, funk, and Go-go. Through beatboxing, rap, and narration, the work traces the connections between musical genres and cultures in America. The work has been programmed by the Wheeling Symphony, Greenville Symphony, Delaware Symphony, and Washington Metropolitan Philharmonic.

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Opera has been a major focus of Meier’s compositional output. His one-act chamber opera, The Last Act of Revolution, was presented by New York City Opera’s VOX Festival in the fall of 2012; it was premiered earlier that year by the University of Maryland Opera Studio. The New York Times described the opera as having “a very polished feel…the music firmly rooted in the drama.” Meier has served as a Resident Artist with the American Lyric Theater, as part of the Composer/Librettist Development Program. In 2014, ALT presented his one-act chamber opera, The Resurrection Engine, which Meier wrote in collaboration with playwright E.M. Lewis. Meier and Lewis completed their first full-length opera collaboration, Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Fallen Giant in 2020. This family-friendly opera combines the world of fairy tales with the storytelling device of a Sherlock Holmes mystery. The concert version of the opera was premiered at the American Lyric Theater Insight ALT Festival, conducted by Andrew Bisantz. The work has been programmed for its world-premiere staging with Opera Modesto and an educational premiere with Portland State University.

 

Meier is originally from Long Beach, California. He currently lives in the Washington D.C. area and serves as the Music Theory and Composition Chair at Levine Music, a community music school.