Roberto Pace is a composer, music director, pianist and educator. He is recognized in concert music, as well as in music for theater and dance. His works have been played, and he has performed, throughout the U.S. and Europe, as well as in Canada, Brazil and Japan.
Mr. Pace studied at the New England Conservatory of Music with Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Donald Martino, and the late great theorist Ernst Oster. He holds an M.F.A. in composition from SUNY Purchase, where he was the first to be awarded the Anthony Newman Prize for artistic and academic excellence.
Mr. Pace's recent commissions include the Network for New Music, American Opera Projects, The Greenwich Village Orchestra, the canonization of Padre Pio, the Viola Society of Philadelphia, the baroque/contemporary ensemble Mélomanie, which has released a commercial recording of his sextet written for them, Chamber Music Now!, the Elysian Camerata, The Gleeksman-Kohn Chorus of the Settlement Music School, and the American Composer's Forum of Philadelphia. He is currently fulfilling a joint commission of three celebrated guitarists for a solo work. His compositions have received public as well as critical success:"…a fantasm of shifting moods, featuring eloquent writing for strings" (NY Times); and "a kaleidoscope of colors wrapped in rhythms that leap with energy" (Philadelphia Inquirer). In 2011 Pace was elected to the Association for the Promotion of New Music (APNM), which will publish several of his scores through Subito Music.
He has served as music director and conductor at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's "Next Wave Festival", at La Mama Etc., and on tour throughout the United States. He has been pianist for many major dance companies and choreographers including the Dance Theater of Harlem, Jerome Robbins, Alvin Ailey, Suzanne Farrell, Peter Pucci, and Patrick Corbin.
A successful educator as well, Mr. Pace directed the music program of Fordham at Lincoln Center and lectured for the New York Philharmonic. He currently teaches theory and composition at the Settlement Music School of Philadelphia, and at Rowan and Drexel Universities. His summers are spent in Lubec, Maine, where he composes, and gives concerts and lectures at the SummerKeys Festival.