Sean Heim, Ph.D.

Born in Philadelphia in 1967, Sean Heim began his first serious musical training in secondary school and soon after began studies in composition with Harold Oliver at Rowan University. He then worked with Native American composer Louis W. Ballard, completed his Masters degree in composition with Chinary Ung at Arizona State University, and holds a Ph.D. from The University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia where he worked with Philip Bracanin. Sean has taught at Rowan University, Rutgers University, and the Settlement Music School. He currently resides in Southern California and is Associate Professor of Music at Chapman University.

The primary focus of Sean Heim’s work as a composer has been to develop an imaginative personal language that strongly reflects the compositional techniques and aesthetic of his own western tradition as well as the distillation and infusion of philosophical ideas and musical elements found in numerous cultures. His work also reflects a deep interest in the visual arts, physics, and the natural world, out of which he has created unique fusions that continually evolve through aesthetic and technical abstraction.

Sean Heim has received numerous prizes, awards, honors, and commissions from such prestigious institutions as the Fromm Foundation at Harvard, the National Endowment for the Arts, Meet the Composer, the American Music Center, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, The American Composers Forum, The ASCAP Foundation - including the Rudolf Nissim Prize and the Morton Gould Young Composers Award, Chapman University, Arizona State University, and The University of Queensland. Sean’s music has been performed to critical acclaim throughout the United States and abroad by such distinguished performers as the California E.A.R. Unit, Piano Spheres, Ensemble Green, the Focus Festival at Juilliard, the Thailand International Composition Festival, inauthentica, Topology, the Auros Group for New Music, Perihelion, and the New York Miniaturist Ensemble. His music is available on Capstone Records.

More information on Sean Heim may be found at: www.seanheim.com