THE NEXT GENERATION

PETER FOLEY

Peter Foley's music and lyrics for The Hidden Sky earned him an NEA grant, the Richard Rodgers Award, the Stephen Sondheim Award, and a Jonathan Larson Foundation grant. The Hidden Sky premiered at the Prince Music Theater in Philadelphia, where it was nominated for seven Barrymore Awards including Outstanding Original Score and Outstanding Production; it was subsequently produced at the Spirit of Broadway Theater in Norwich, Connecticut, where it received the Spirit Award for Best Original Score. Concert versions have been performed at Ars Nova and Joe's Pub in NYC. Peter's other stage works include The Bear (Golden Fleece, Triangle Theater Co., Opera Unlimited), music for "To Sing" from Songs from an Unmade Bed (New York Theatre Workshop) and scores for several plays, including Newton's Universe (Arts at St. Ann's), Henry V (New Jersey Shakespeare Festival), W.B. Yeats's The Only Jealousy of Emer (Playwrights Horizons Theater School), Andre Gregory's Alice in Wonderland (Berkeley Theater Project), and The Mildred Piece (InCoAct, NYC). Upcoming theater projects include a music-theater piece with playwright Ellen McLaughlin and the new musical comedy Bloom. Peter's songs have been performed at Lincoln Center, Town Hall, Symphony Space and LaMaMa, among other venues. He has also composed scores and themes for numerous television documentaries, including "Listening To America with Bill Moyers" and the award-winning PBS series "Art:21." Peter has served as musical director/keyboardist for the premieres of Rinde Eckert's Highway Ulysses (American Repertory Theater, dir. Robert Woodruff), Kenneth Vega's Heartfield (Baltimore Theater Project), and for several concerts by actor/singer-songwriter Manoel Felciano. He is the recipient of fellowships and residencies from the MacDowell and Millay colonies, the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center's National Music Theater Conference, and the Sundance Playwrights Retreat at Ucross. He lives outside New York City with his wife, writer/director Kate Chisholm, and their daughter. See hellagoodmusic.com for more information.

LEARN MORE ABOUT THE COMPOSER

Q. What was the first thing you did after you learned you'd been given this American Musical Voices Project: Next Generation grant?
A. Wrote an email thank-you to Ted & Mary Jo Shen (after I stopped crying).

Q. Do you have any specific plans for your composition?
A. Not yet. I plan for it to be fabulous, however.

Q. Are there any performers you are longing to work with?
A. So many! But I'm not foolish enough to alienate the ones who wouldn't make the list by making a list.

Q. How did your musical journey begin? When did you first begin playing music? Composing?
A. I started playing piano at an early age (was relatively successful), started composing as a teenager to try and impress girls (less successful), and went insane for good when I first saw Sweeney Todd, the cast album of which I proceeded to listen to every day for a year.

Q. Do you have formal music training?
A. Yes. Lots. Could always use more, though.

Q. Who are your biggest music inspirations?
A. John Adams, Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, Peter Gabriel, Stephen Sondheim, and U2.

Q. Who's on your iPod?
A. Peter Apfelbaum & The New York Heiroglyphics (where's the love for this guy?!), Benjamin Britten, Kate Bush, Hanns Eisler, Maurice Ravel, M.I.A., XTC, Various members of the 6-against-4 club, a disproportionate number of British and Irish bands, Rock of the 80s (complete)

Q. What current artist, besides yourself, of course, are you most excited about? Why?
A. Again, there are so many, but Meredith Monk continues to inspire and excite me through her faith in, and commitment to, her personal artistic and spiritual journey. She has managed, over the long term, to forge a successful career creating work that is completely unlike anything else in contemporary theater or music, work that seems to have sprung from her own journey of self-exploration and desire for self-expression, without any regard for its commercial potential. I admire her courage and her tenacity!
Her reliance on non-verbal storytelling through image, movement and gibberish has expanded my aesthetic horizons, in terms of theatrical problem-solving. I've come to realize that language can sometimes obscure the "point," and that images are sometimes more emotionally resonant than words. The primal, trance-like quality of her work is a powerful testament to the fact that sacred ritual is one of the deep roots of theater, which I think is important to remember. I try to see everything she does.

Q. What's next for you? Any projects, beyond this commission, that you are working on currently?
A. I've got a musical comedy called Bloom that's half finished, and playwright Ellen McLaughlin and I are working on a pretty intense piece set in post-World War I France that's maybe one-third finished, and I'm revising an old show for a new production, as well. It's feast or famine on this path, and having been through my share of famine, I'm really enjoying the feast.