Most people are musical and possess a fine sense of rhythm... All too often, though, upon first encountering traditional music education, they become intimidated, or worse, discouraged, and lead the rest of their lives as musical 'wannabes.'...
Composer, music theorist, and an active educator. He graduated from Trinity College, Hartt College of Music, and Princeton University, with additional studies at the Mozarteum, the Wiener Hochschule fur Musik, and Stanford University. He has received grants and commissions from the NEA, Meet the Composer, Fulbright, Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations among others. His music has been performed by many prominent contemporary music groups including Eighth Blackbird, the Brooklyn Philharmonic's Chamber Music Players, at the Spoleto Festival and broadcast on NPR's All Things Considered.
Director of Chamber Music for the Strings International Festival, featuring members of the Philadelphia Orchestra. He has been composer-in-residence at the Special Music School in New York City where he wrote a new work for the gala reopening of Merkin Concert Hall. Under the direction of the Director of Education of the NY Philharmonic and the COmmissioning Project he was in residence at Manhattan East Arts & Sciences School in East Harlem. Locally, he composed an orchestra with digital soundtrack work for the opening of the Performing Arts Center in Princeton, and the following year an evening's program of music for the UNICEF Concert. In 2008, he founded and directed a chamber music program for the Youth Orchestra of Central New Jersey.
Ira Mowitz has been an NEA Visiting composer at California Institute for the Arts, and a Visiting Professor at the Krakow Academy of Music under the aegis of the Fulbright Senior Scholars Program. He is widely know for his work with computers and music -- in particular his critically acclaimed CD -- "A la Memoire d'un Ami" (Albion) name number 5 on Billboard Magazine's Century List.