Troy Peters, M.A.
Ensemble Director, Orchestra, Music
Contact
- troy.peters@utsa.edu
- troy.peters@utsa.edu
Bio
Hailed by the San Antonio Current as “consistently brilliant and impossibly cool,” conductor Troy Peters is Director of the UTSA Orchestra at the University of Texas San Antonio and Music Director of YOSA (Youth Orchestras of San Antonio). In 2016, Musical America featured him in their special issue, The MA30 Professionals of the Year: The Innovators. Formerly Resident Conductor of the San Antonio Symphony, Peters has guest conducted many orchestras, including the Oregon Symphony, San Antonio Philharmonic, Vermont Symphony Orchestra, West Virginia Symphony Orchestra, and Round Rock Symphony. He was previously Music Director of the Vermont Youth Orchestra and Montpelier Chamber Orchestra, and conducted college orchestras at Texas State University and Middlebury College. Among the summer festivals where he has appeared are Curtis Summerfest, the Kinhaven Music School, and the Sewanee Summer Music Festival, and he has led All-State Orchestras in Alabama, Nebraska, and Washington. He has also gained international attention for his orchestral collaborations with rock musicians, including Blind Pilot, Jon Anderson (of the band Yes), and Trey Anastasio (of the band Phish), with whom he recorded two albums on Elektra Records. Working with dozens of San Antonio rock musicians, he created YOSA’s Classic Albums Live series, winner of a 2016 Centropolitan Award from Centro San Antonio and a 2016 Best of the City Award from San Antonio Magazine.
Peters conducted the world premiere recording of Daron Hagen’s Masquerade with violinist Jaime Laredo, cellist Sharon Robinson, and the Vermont Symphony Orchestra, on Bridge Records. Among the other soloists with whom he has collaborated are Branford Marsalis, Midori, Edgar Meyer, Time for Three, and Richard Stoltzman. His work has been the subject of national media attention from CBS Sunday Morning, National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition, Symphony, and The New Yorker. Awarded a Vermont Arts Council Citation of Merit in 2009, he has also been honored with eight ASCAP Awards for Adventurous Programming of Contemporary Music and has conducted more than three-dozen world premieres. A popular lecturer, he has presented pre-concert talks for the Philadelphia Orchestra, Carnegie Hall, Vermont Symphony Orchestra, and San Antonio Symphony, as well as acclaimed talks at TEDx San Antonio, Pecha Kucha San Antonio, and Texas Public Radio’s Worth Repeating.
Peters is also active as a composer, where his honors include the Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and grants from Meet the Composer and the Rockefeller Foundation. He holds degrees from the Curtis Institute of Music and the University of Pennsylvania, where his primary compositional mentors were Ned Rorem and George Crumb. Born in 1969 in Greenock, Scotland (of American parents), Peters grew up in Tacoma, Washington, and lives in San Antonio with his wife and two children.
Degrees
B.M., Curtis Institute of Music
M.A., University of Pennsylvania
