Biography

Composer Elinor Armer comes from a family of writers, artists, and inventors. Born in Oakland, California in 1939, raised in Davis, and educated in the San Francisco Bay Area, she has spent her life on the West Coast and closely identifies with Northern California. Armer earned a BA at Mills College, studying composition with Darius Milhaud and piano with Alexander Libermann, and an MA in composition from San Francisco State University, working with Roger Nixon. Armer’s music is widely performed throughout the United States and abroad. It includes solo, chamber, orchestral, vocal, and choral works, many devoted to word-setting. For the 2014-15 concert season, Armer mounted nine retrospectives of her music, including four one-woman shows and four world premieres, celebrating her 75th birthday in a Diamond Jubilee series. Among her best-known works for a variety of forces is ‘Uses of Music in Uttermost Parts’, an eight-part fantasy series created over a ten- year period with writer Ursula K. Le Guin. All of Armer’s music is published by Subito Music. For all of her adult life, Armer has taught piano, theory, composition, and music history at every level, in schools and universities and at her home in Berkeley, California. She has also given master classes in the U.S. and abroad, including China’s Shanghai Conservatory. For the last 50 years she has been affiliated with the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, where in 1985 she established the composition department, and where she continues to teach composition. Since 2014, the Conservatory has awarded the Elinor Armer Scholarship in Composition to qualifying applicants. Countless of Armer’s students have achieved success and recognition as composers and continue to thrive as a result of her mentoring.