Composer Joseph Summer began playing French horn at the age of seven. While attending the Eastern Music Festival in North Carolina at age fourteen he studied composition with the eminent Czech composer Karel Husa. At age 15 he was accepted at Oberlin Conservatory, where he studied composition with Richard Hoffmann, Schönberg’s amanuensis; and graduated with a BM in Music Composition in 1976. Recruited by Robert Page, Dean of the Music Department at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), Joseph was hired as a full-time faculty member at CMU when he was twenty years old. At the prestigious school Summer devised the conservatory’s freshman music theory curriculum and taught the Theory 101 classes. Despite this early entry into academia, Summer chose to leave after just two years in order to pursue composition full time.

For the next twenty years Joseph Summer concentrated his efforts composing a series of comic operas based on the bawdy stories of Boccaccio’s The Decameron. These consist of four completed works: And The Dead Shall Walk The Earth; Courting Disaster; Their Fate In The Hands Of The Friar; and Gianetta. The fifth and sixth in a projected cycle of seven: Also Known As and The Ignoble, The Grotesque, The Heretical are in progress.

Summer is currently composing his ever expanding collection of settings of the bard’s ever living texts, which he titles The Oxford Songs, (titled thus due to Summer’s support of Edward De Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, as the likely identity of the author also known as William Shakespeare.) In addition to the individual scenes, sonnets, and songs from Shakespeare in The Oxford Songs, Summer completed the opera Hamlet, in 2006 and The Tempest in 2013. Summer’s operas Hippolytus and The Tenor’s Suite have been performed several times in piano reduction. In the recent past Summer has focused on string quartets, including The Garden of Forking Paths, the Sea Change Quartets (two quartets depicting littoral scenes), The Book of Invisible Women, and Zócalo.

Recent performances include “Sycorax” from The Book of Invisible Women with the Ulysses Quartet at Carnegie Hall (May 11, 2022) and the fully staged premiere of the opera Hamlet in Ruse, Bulgaria in May and June 2021, along with its recording by Navona Records, for release in 2022. Summer’s Tempest Sonata for Violin and Piano will be the featured work at the Carnegie Hall debut of Solo Violinist Christina Bouey ( October 3, 2022). Other upcoming performances include Laudatores Temporis Acti for Piano Trio with the Neave Trio (September 24) in Boston; and Tantivy with hornist Radek Baborák, and pianist Miroslav Sekera in Prague (October 2022).