PAUL SCHUYLER PHILLIPS, is an award-winning conductor, composer and author whose talents encompass a wide range of musical activities. Acclaimed as a conductor “who was born to stand on a podium,” his honors include 1st Prize in the NOS International Conductors Course in Holland, 1st Prize in the Wiener Meisterkurse Conductors Course in Vienna, selection for the Exxon/Arts Endowment Conductors Program, and receiving nine ASCAP Awards for Adventurous Programming of Contemporary Music with three different orchestras. He has conducted over 60 orchestras, opera and ballet companies worldwide, including the San Francisco Symphony, Dallas Symphony, Detroit Symphony, Rochester Philharmonic, Rhode Island Philharmonic, Boston Academy of Music, Opera Providence, Festival Ballet Providence, Netherlands Radio Chamber Orchestra and Iceland Symphony Orchestra, with which he recorded two compact discs. Recent guest conducting engagements include Madama Butterfly with Commonwealth Opera, Don Giovanni with Brown Summer Opera, a performance in Portugal with the Braga Chamber Orchestra and Chorus, and concerts with the Massachusetts and Vermont All-State Orchestras.

Under his leadership, the Brown University Orchestra has become recognized as one of the top university orchestras in the US, winning seven ASCAP Awards and performing with such illustrious soloists as Itzhak Perlman, Joseph Kalichstein, Christopher O’Riley, Eugenia Zukerman, Carol Wincenc, Sergiu Luca and the Dave Brubeck Quartet. In 2006-07, Phillips led the Brown Orchestra on a New Year’s concert tour of China, performing in Beijing, Shanghai, Dalian, Suzhou, Changzhou and Ningbo; they have also performed in New York at Carnegie Hall and Avery Fisher Hall as well as in Boston, Cambridge and Montreal. In 2006, Daniel Barenboim conducted the orchestra during his residency at Brown with the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra. Barry Bostwick, Kate Burton, Oskar Eustis, Bill Harley, Senator Lincoln Chafee and Brown University President Ruth Simmons are among those who have narrated works with Phillips and the Brown Orchestra.

As Music Director and Conductor since 1994, Phillips has led the Pioneer Valley Symphony and Chorus to new artistic heights, securing its position as one of the preeminent musical organizations in western Massachusetts. He has spearheaded collaborative projects with the Springfield Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, Hampshire Choral Society, Old Deerfield Productions, Amherst Ballet, glass artist Josh Simpson, and other artists and arts organizations throughout the region, and led the PVS in memorable performances of Beethoven’s Ninth, Mahler’s Second and Fifth Symphonies, the Verdi Requiem, The Rite of Spring, The Planets, Carmina Burana and Ellis Island: The Dream of America. Under his leadership, the PVS has won an ASCAP Award for Adventurous Programming, been profiled twice in Symphony Magazine, been recorded on the Living with the Classics CD box set produced by Arizona University Recordings, and been selected to participate in the national Ford Made in America Project.

With a conducting repertoire of over 900 works, Phillips has conducted much of the standard repertoire, including opera and musical theatre ranging from The Magic Flute to Sweeney Todd. He enjoys jazz and has led concerts featuring Dizzy Gillespie, Ray Charles, Tony Bennett and other popular artists. A strong believer in the importance of music in the lives of young people, he has worked extensively with student musicians and audiences as Youth Concert Conductor of the Maryland Symphony for fourteen years and as conductor of numerous youth and All-State orchestras. In collaboration with Bill Harley, the Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter, he has composed and arranged pieces for youth concerts that are performed by orchestras throughout the country.

After attending the Eastman School of Music as a composition-piano double major, Phillips graduated cum laude in music from Columbia University, later earning graduate degrees in composition and conducting from Columbia and the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, respectively. He pursued additional studies at the Salzburg “Mozarteum”, Académie internationale d'été in Nice, Eastman, Music Academy of the West, Aspen and Tanglewood. His conducting teachers include Kurt Masur, Gunther Schuller and Leonard Bernstein. After beginning his career at the Frankfurt Opera and Stadttheater Lüneburg in Germany, he returned to the US, assuming conducting posts in Greensboro and Savannah before arriving at Brown University in 1989.

Apart from conducting, Phillips is also an accomplished composer, pianist and author. His music has been performed internationally and received many prizes, including awards from the New England String Ensemble, American Music Center and ASCAP. His piano music is featured in the upcoming motion picture Hachiko, directed by Lasse Hallström and starring Richard Gere. Recent works include War Music and War Music Suite (premiered in 2009 by the Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra); A/B (2007), a composition for actor and chamber ensemble premiered at the 2007 FirstWorksProv Festival; and Battle-Pieces, a song cycle on poems by Herman Melville. As a pianist, he has performed at the Mohawk Trail Concerts, Piccolo Spoleto Festival, Carnegie Recital Hall and Lincoln Center, and recorded for film and television.

Considered the leading authority on the music of composer-novelist Anthony Burgess, Phillips is a featured commentator in the BBC television documentary The Burgess Variations and the author of writings published in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Portraits of the Artist in A Clockwork Orange, and Anthony Burgess and Modernity. His book A Clockwork Counterpoint: The Music and Literature of Anthony Burgess is scheduled to be published in 2010 by Manchester University Press.