Eric Moe (b. 1954) is professor of Composition and Music Theory at the University of Pittsburgh, director of the University of Pittsburgh Electroacoustic Music Studio, and co-director of the Music on the Edge new music concert series. He studied composition at Princeton University and earned an MA and PhD from the University of California at Berkeley. Moe founded the PhD program in Composition/Theory in the Music Department at the University of Pittsburgh. He is currently the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Composition and Theory and has held visiting professorships at Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Buffalo.

Moe was a founding member of EARPLAY, a new music ensemble based in San Francisco, California. He is known as a composer and pianist and has received wide recognition for his work, including the Lakond Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He has been commissioned by the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, the Fromm Foundation, the Koussevitzky Foundation, the Barlow Endowment, and Meet-the-Composer USA. In addition, Moe earned fellowships from the Wellesley Composer’s Conference and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, as well as residencies at the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Bellagio, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Millay Colony, the Ragdale Foundation, the Montana Artists Refuge, the Carson McCullers Center for Writers and Musicians, and the American Dance Festival. He served on the faculties of the San Francisco State University from 1981 to 1989 and the University of California, Santa Cruz from 1980 to 1981. His principal publishers are Dead Elf Music and Subito.

Moe’s music has been variously described as “maximal minimalism,” “Rachmaninoff in hell,” and “music of winning exuberance.” Although the surfaces and genres are varied, his works share a concern for rhythmic propulsion and a disregard for stylistic orthodoxies. Sometimes tonal, sometimes not, harmony (generally crunchy) and melody (often angular) play privileged roles in his work. Tri-Stan, his sit-trag/one-woman opera on a text by David Foster Wallace, was premiered by Sequitur in 2005 and hailed by the New York Times as “a blockbuster” and “a tour de force,” a work of “inspired weight” that “subversively inscribe[s] classical music into pop culture.” In its review of the piece, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette concluded, “It is one of those rare works that transcends the cultural divide while still being rooted in both sides.”

Works by Moe have appeared on several recordings. Strange Exclaiming Music, a CD featuring Moe’s chamber music, was released by Naxos in July 2009 as part of their American Classics series. Fanfare magazine described it as “wonderfully inventive, often joyful, occasionally melancholy, highly rhythmic, frequently irreverent, absolutely eclectic, and always high-octane music.” WQXR picked up Kick & Ride as one of their albums of the week, commenting that “it’s completely easy to succumb to the beats and rhythms that come out of Moe’s fantastical imaginarium, a headspace that ties together the free-flowing atonality of Alban Berg with the guttural rumblings of Samuel Barber’s Medea, adding in a healthy dose of superhuman strength.” Other all-Moe CDs are available on New World Records (Meanwhile Back at the Ranch), Albany Records (Kicking and Screaming, Up & At ‘Em, Siren Songs), and Centaur (On the Tip of My Tongue). The Sienese Shredder, a fine arts journal, includes an all-Moe CD as part of its third issue.

As a pianist and keyboardist, Moe has premiered and performed works by a wide variety of composers. He can be heard on the Koch, CRI, Mode, Albany, New World Records, and Innova labels playing his own compositions as well as the music of John Cage, Roger Zahab, Marc-Antonio Consoli, Mathew Rosenblum, Jay Reise, Ezra Sims, David Keberle, Felix Draeseke, and many others. His solo recording The Waltz Project Revisited – New Waltzes for Piano, a CD of waltzes for piano by two generations of American composers, was released in 2004 on Albany. Gramophone Magazine said of the CD, “Moe’s command of the varied styles is nothing short of remarkable.”