Peter Kramer

Peter Kramer was born in Portland, Oregon (1989) where he studied composition, piano and violin with Dr. Marshall Tuttle at Mount Hood Community College. He has recently graduated from the Oberlin Conservatory as an undergrad with a double major in Composition and Harpsichord Performance. His principal teachers include Dr. Lewis Nielson and Webb William Wiggins; he plans on attending graduate school after his time at Oberlin. Peter’s music focuses on “musical parasites” i.e. residual and musical anomalies resulting from performance paired with the resonant sound-world of 16th and 17th century music, particularly keyboard and choral repertoires, as well as the sound world of American folk and blues traditions.

Year round Peter works in Oberlin’s piano/keyboard workshop where he has recently helped restore an 1810 Broadwood forte piano and where he maintains and repairs harpsichords on the Oberlin campus under the direction of Robert Murphy. Apart from composition and harpsichord performance, his interests include harpsichord building and maintenance, playing the lute and baroque guitar, and studying aspects of American folk and blues music. He has co-founded the Ensemble Kritik with fellow Oberlin students Carrie Frey (viola) and Eastman Presser (electronics/percussion) on the Oberlin campus, with future plans of performance in and outside of the conservatory.

Peter has most recently attended the SICPP and Nief-Norf composition festivals where he worked with composers Roger Reynolds and Christopher Adler. He has participated in harpsichord master classes with Mitzi Meyerson, Charles Metz, Ton Koopman, Jacques Ogg and Michael Sponseller; and composition master classes with Rodger Reynolds, Jason Eckhardt, Phillip Cashian, George Lewis, and Mark Barden. He has attended the Vancouver Early Music Festival, Baroque Performance Institute, Accademia d'Amore opera workshop, and New Music on the Point festivals, and has also spent time at the Banff Center in Alberta Canada as an artist in residence working on composition in 2012. He has been awarded the Walter E. Aschaffenburg Prize in Composition, Earl L. Russel Award in Historical Performance and the Shansi Prize for his choral composition AMA from Oberlin Conservatory. Additionally, Peter has been mentored by composers Eric Wubbles, Josh Levine, and Daniel Tacke.