Eric Moe (1954- ), composer of what The NY Times calls "music of winning exuberance", has received numerous grants and awards for his work, including the Lakond Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Guggenheim Fellowship; commissions from the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, the Fromm Foundation, the Koussevitzky Foundation, and Meet-the-Composer USA; fellowships from the Wellesley Composer's Conference and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts; and residencies at the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Bellagio, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Millay Colony, the Ragdale Foundation, the Montana Artists Refuge, and the American Dance Festival.
Most recently, his "one-woman opera" Tri-Stan was hailed by The New York Times as "a blockbuster" and "a tour de force"; "the evening's biggest event", a work of "inspired weight" that "subversively inscribe[s] classical music into pop culture". The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette titled its review, "Moe's Marvelous Tri-Stan Pokes Fun at Pop and High Art", and concluded, "For an audience, it is one of those rare works that transcends the cultural divide while still being rooted in both sides." The work will soon be available on compact disc.
His Sonnets to Orpheus, featured on the Works & Process series at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2000, is currently available on a Koch International Classics CD which also includes his Siren Songs. Another all-Moe CD, Kicking and Screaming, has recently been released by Albany Records, joining his recent Up & At 'Em on the same label. Compact disc recordings of other works are available from Centaur (On the Tip of My Tongue: Chamber and Electroacoustic Music of Eric Moe; Lions Gate Trio: Four American Trios), New World, and others.
As a pianist and keyboard player, Moe has performed works by hundreds of composers, from Anthony Davis to Stefan Wolpe. His playing can be heard on the Koch, CRI, Mode, and AK/Coburg labels in the music of John Cage, Roger Zahab, Marc-Antonio Consoli, Mathew Rosenblum, and Felix Draeseke. His solo recording The Waltz Project Revisited - New Waltzes for Piano, a CD of waltzes for piano by two generations of American composers, has just been released; Gramophone magazine says in its review of the CD, "Moe's command of the varied styles is nothing short of remarkable." A founding member of the San Francisco-based EARPLAY ensemble, he currently co-directs the Music on the Edge new music concert series in Pittsburgh.
Moe was educated at the University of California at Berkeley (M.A., Ph.D.) and at Princeton University (A.B.) He is currently Professor of Composition and Theory at the University of Pittsburgh, where he directs the graduate program in composition and the department's electroacoustic music studio.