Discipline: Music Composition

Michael Schelle

Discipline: Music Composition
Region: Indianapolis, IN
MacDowell Fellowships: 1977, 1988

Michael Schelle is composer in residence at Butler University. His music has been commissioned and/or performed by more than 350 orchestras, symphonic bands, and professional chamber ensembles across the U.S. and abroad, including the Chicago Symphony, the Minnesota Orchestra, the Detroit Symphony, the major orchestras of Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Louisville, Cincinnati, Kansas City, and Cleveland, the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, the Manhattan Chamber Orchestra, Urban Elektra (Phoenix), ISIS (Dallas), and XTET (Los Angeles). Recent international performances of his music have included Kammerorchester Basel (Switzerland), the St. Petersburg (Russia) Chamber Orchestra, the Kremlin Chamber Orchestra (Moscow), the Beijing Opera House, CoMET (Tokyo), Zimbabwe, and the Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia) Symphonic Wind Ensemble. He has received composition grants and awards from more than 30 prestigious arts organizations including the Rockefeller Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, American Symphony Orchestra League (NYC), National Band Association (2012 Revelli Composition Prize), the Barlow Foundation, New York State Arts Council, Great Lakes Arts Alliance, New England Arts Foundation, the Welsh Arts Council (Cardiff), and the American Pianists Association, and has held extended composition residencies at dozens of leading American universities and new music festivals, Spoleto USA, Wolf Trap, MacDowell, and in Europe, China, and Japan, including Nagoya Imperial University.

Studios

MacDowell

Michael Schelle worked in the MacDowell studio.

Built in 1912, Pine Studio was renamed MacDowell Studio in 1943 in recognition of support from a group of Edward MacDowell’s music students. It was built as a composers’ studio and the stuccoed walls were intended to be soundproof. Like many of the studios on property, MacDowell was winterized in the 1950s when the program began welcoming…

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