Paul Shoenfield (1947 -  )

Paul Schoenfield, is a native of Detroit, was born in 1947. He began studying piano at age six and wrote his first composition the following year. He eventually studied piano with Julius Chajes, Ozan Marsh, and Rudolf Serkin. He holds a degree from Carnegie-Mellon University, as well as a Doctor of Music Arts degree from the University of Arizona.

A man of many interests, he is also an avid scholar of mathematics and Hebrew. He held his first teaching post in Toledo, Ohio, lived on a kibbutz in Israel and was a free-lance composer and pianist in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area.

Comparing him to George Gershwin may be stretching it a bit, but there are some similarities. Schoenfield also mixes classical with jazz and popular music forms. Schoenfield can write good tunes. Like Gershwin, Schoenfield is Jewish and influenced by Jewish folk music.

But Schoenfield occasionally adds one element to his mix that doesn't exist at all in Gershwin: sections of loud, dissonant modern music. This is might challenge many a listener, however, most of this eclectic sound structure is not only highly accessible, it's outright entertaining.

Within a single composition Schoenfield can go from jazz to vaudeville to klezmer (a kind of Eastern European Jewish folk/jazz with a small band headed by a clarinet) to a Strauss waltz to blues to Dixieland, as he does in Vaudeville. Or he can go from dissonant modern to blues, big band and Broadway musical, as he does in Four Parables.

Mr. Schoenfield has received commissions and grants from the NEA, the Ohio Arts Commission, Chamber Music America, the Rockefeller Fund, the Minnesota Commissioning Club, American Composers Forum, Soli Deo Gloria of Chicago, and many other organizations.
 Among his recordings are the complete violin and piano works of Bartok with Sergiu Luca. His compositions can be heard on the Angel, Decca, Innova, Vanguard, EMI, Koch, BMG, and the New World labels.