Education and Career
Child took his first composition lessons at the age of 12 with Bernard Barrell. He began attending Keele University in Staffordshire, England, but transferred to Reed College in Portland, Oregon in 1973 in a junior-year exchange program. He earned his BA in music at Reed in 1975. Child then studied Kamatic music in Madras, India for one year on a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship. In 1978 he won a fellowship to the Berkshire Music Center in Lenox, Massachusetts, where he studied under Jacob Druckman. In 1981 he received his PhD in musical composition from Brandeis University, where his teachers included Arthur Berger, Martin Boykan, and Seymour Shifrin.
Child taught at Brandeis and chaired MIT's department of Music and Theater Arts from 1996 to 1999.
He was the American Symphony Orchestra League – Meet the Composer "Music Alive" composer in residence with the Albany Symphony Orchestra from 2005 to 2008. Child wrote five new compositions for that orchestra, including Washington Park, a work inspired by the city's Washington Park Historic District.
Read more about this topic: Peter Child
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