Leon Kirchner is a contemporary American composer, born in 1919 in Brooklyn, New York to Russian parents. Kirchner grew up in Los Angeles, and there began studying with Arnold Schoenberg, a turn that profoundly influenced his development as a composer. Today, Kircher is an Pulitzer-winning composer, as well as a gifted pianist and conductor, and has written pieces for many of the country’s finest performers and ensembles, including the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Yo-Yo Ma, Russell Sherman and Jonathan Biss.

Kirchner’s own musical voice has remained strikingly unique. Early influences included Hindemith, Bartók and Stravinsky. His later works, however, seem aesthetically closest to those of Schoenberg, Webern and Berg, but without employing the strict serial techniques of these composers. As Aaron Copland observed, “Whatever else may be said, this is music that is most certainly felt.”

Leon Kirchner has also been a key player in building Boston’s new music scene, and was formerly conductor of the Gardner Chamber Orchestra. As writer Michael Steinberg notes, “Kirchner established the first graduate program in composition at Harvard, as well as a truly remarkable course, which combined analysis and performance. From this course grew a broad range of music making which Kirchner single-handedly coordinated and conducted. The Cambridge/Boston community is profoundly in his debt.”