Education
During his late teenage years, Balter studied privately with composer Almeida Prado and pianist Linda Bustani.
During his late teenage years, Balter studied privately with composer Almeida Prado and pianist Linda Bustani.
Life and Professional Balter began his music studies at age five at the Conservatório Musical Heitor Villa-Lobos, and was admitted to the Conservatório Brasileiro de Música at age eleven. He moved to the United States in 1996 to study music composition at Texas Christian University and later on at Northwestern University. Past honors include commissions from Meet the Composer, Chamber Music America, the Fromm Music Foundation, and the Art Institute of Chicago, as well as fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Tanglewood Music Center (Leonard Bernstein Fellowship), Lawrence University, and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation.
He was the Director of Music Composition Studies at Columbia College Chicago from 2009 to 2014, Visiting Professor of Composition at the University of Pittsburgh in 2008-2009, and Visiting Professor at Northwestern University in 2010.
Balter"s eclectic and unique compositional voice draws from several sources ranging from Spectral Music to Postminimalism, with a special emphasis on unusual sound colors and complex rhythmic patterns. His music often blurs the boundaries between Modernism and Post-Modernism, and is embraced by a wide array of musical trends.
To that extent, his particularly close relationship with artists like the International Contemporary Ensemble, Ensemble Dal Niente, and violist Nadia Sirota have decidedly shaped his musical language into what critics describe as "a fiercely imaginative palette of instrumental and vocal sounds rare in today"s dour, post-classical new music" (The Chicago Tribune), "surrealistic" (The New York Times), and "a virtuosic equilibrium of colliding particles" (Boston Globe). His catalogue includes works for solo instruments, electroacoustic music, chamber music, and orchestral works.
