2016 Mizzou International Composers Festival resident composer Daniel Silliman was born in Syracuse, NY and grew up in Katy, TX, near Houston.

He began studying piano as a child, and upon graduating high school, enrolled in the USC Thornton School of Music in Los Angeles, where his composition teachers included Andrew Norman, who was a distinguished guest composer at last year’s MICF.

After graduating summa cum laude from USC in 2015 with a B.M. in composition, Silliman is now a doctoral fellow working on an MFA/Ph.D in composition at Princeton University in New Jersey. His teachers there include Louis Andriessen and another former MICF distinguished guest composer, Donnacha Dennehy, who was part of the 2012 festival.

Silliman’s music has been recognized with a number of awards and honors, including the 2015 William Schuman Prize from the BMI Foundation; an ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Award, for which he was a finalist in 2012 and a winner in 2015; and being selected as a resident composer in New York Youth Symphony’s First Music competition.

In 2015, Silliman was one of seven young composers chosen to participate in CULTIVATE, the annual composers institute at Copland House, which is the former home of composer Aaron Copland in upstate New York that’s now a center for new music. Daniel Silliman’s music also has been presented by the Gamper Festival of Contemporary Music, American Festival for the Arts, Texas Music Teachers Association, and Access Contemporary Music.

His new work created for the 2016 MICF is titled “Endless Castle Romance,” and will be premiered by Alarm Will Sound along with new pieces from the other seven resident composers at the festival’s grand finale on Saturday, July 30 at the Missouri Theatre.

You can hear samples of Daniel Silliman’s music on his SoundCloud page and in the embedded media players below.

“strain” for cello and orchestra, featuring Michael Kaufman (cello) and the USC Symphony conducted by Donald Crockett.

“mechanical trees,” a 2014 work for bassoon, percussion, piano and page turns that was premiered and recorded on July 28, 2014 at the Bowdoin International Music Festival in Brunswick, ME.

“scaffold,” recorded February 24, 2015 in Los Angeles at the University of Southern California’s Joyce J. Cammileri Hall, featuring Clara Kim (violin), Michael Kaufman (cello), and Brendan White (piano).