Peter Gilbert's music has been heard in concerts and festivals across the United States and Europe in venues ranging from the Kennedy Center to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, played by groups like the Arditti String Quartet and the Bang on a Can All-Stars.
Gilbert's most recent work is intensely interactive. He develops works collaboratively with unique, sensitive musicians, merging and interpenetrating acoustic instruments and live-electronics . He has worked with remarkable performers such as Mario Caroli (flute), Jeremias Schwarzer (recorder), Michael Norsworthy (clarinet), Philipp Stäudlin (saxophone), White Rabbit (conductor: Eric Hewitt), and Daniel Lippel (guitar). He has also worked with filmmaker Alexander Berman on music for the prizewinning documentary Songs from the Tundra. Gilbert also performs as an improviser using live electronics and has taught seminars, workshops and classes on the subject.
Gilbert was an artist in residence at ZKM (Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie Karlsruhe) and fellow at the Akademie Schloß Solitude in 2009 with his partner Karola Obermüller collaborating on an experimental chamber opera with singers, actors and electronics for premiere in the Musik der Jahrhunderte festival. Obermüller and Gilbert will join three other composers in creating a five-part opera on the Schumanns for the bicentenary of Robert's birth in 1810 for premiere in 2011
His book The Listen, written with Christopher Jon Honett, is available now. It explores nine different experiences listening to nine extraordinary pieces of contemporary repertoire. Each piece inspires its own journey through idiosyncratic philosophical musings on creativity, listening and their connections to living.
His music is available on New Focus Recordings, including his work Ricochet for guitar and electronics available on the CD "Resonance" from New Focus and on the CD "Sustenance" which has six musical bridges by Gilbert (Passage I-VI) which seamlessly connect the different concert pieces to one another. The Third Practice Festival, which commissioned Gilbert's Blow, Bugle, Blow in 2003, released a CD on Centaur Records including Gilbert's piece Rituals.
He has been composer-in-residence for the Newburyport Chamber Music Festival and held artist residencies in Ischia (Italy), Bourges (France) and Treehaven (Wisconsin). Gilbert was the recipient of a 2008 Barlow Commission, Hear as the Night Hollows which was premiered at Northeastern University. As a winner of the International Competition of Electroacoustic Music and Sonic Art / Bourges, Gilbert held a residency at the Institut International de Musique Electroacoustique de Bourges in 2004. Other accolades awarded to Gilbert's music include prizes from the Russolo Foundation, the Look & Listen Festival, and the Washington International Composers Competition.
In 2010-11 Gilbert will join the University of New Mexico as Assistant Professor of Music Composition. He has taught music composition and music theory at Wellesley College, Harvard University, Case Western Reserve University, the Cleveland Institute of Music, Northeastern University and University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth. He also teaches privately and acts as co-director of the Young Composers Program at CIM (Cleveland Institute of Music), where he teaches each summer. Gilbert has degrees from the Cleveland Institute of Music, Illinois Wesleyan University, and a doctorate from Harvard University. His teachers have included Julian Anderson, Margaret Brouwer, Mario Davidovsky, Joshua Fineberg, Lee Hyla, Bernard Rands, Hans Tutschku, David Vayo and most recently Helmut Lachenmann.