(Photo credit: Daniel Lin)

American composer Harold Meltzer passed away at 58, due to complications from a stroke.

Meltzer was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1966, and grew up in Long Island, where he studied piano and had instruction in music theory from Morton Estrin. He studied composition, piano, and bassoon at Amherst College, where he graduated summa cum laude in 1988. Meltzer went on to earn degrees from King’s College, Cambridge (1990), Columbia University School of Law (1992), and Yale University School of Music (1997) and (2000).

His vocal works include “Bride of the Island,” a song cycle to poems of Ted Hughes commissioned by the Minnesota Commissioning Club for tenor Paul Appleby and pianist Natalia Katyukova, Variations on a Summer Day,” a song cycle to the Wallace Stevens poem for mezzo-soprano and nine instruments, “from a book of beautiful monsters,” for soprano, mandolin, and guitar, “Pacific Beach for SSATBB voices,” and many more. He received commissions from the Library of Congress, Brooklyn Art Song Society, and NewMusicUSA, among others. His works have been recorded on Albany, Naxos, and Bridge.

Meltzer was a Pulitzer Prize Finalist in 2009 for his sextet “Brion.” He was awarded the Rome Prize, the Barlow Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and both the Arts and Letters Award in Music and the Charles Ives Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Meltzer founded and co-directed the new music ensemble Sequitur for fifteen years. He taught at Amherst College, Vassar College, and at the Setnor School of Music at Syracuse University.

Meltzer is survived by his wife and two children.