“It was by looking back that artists of the fifteenth century found a way of re-connecting with the past and thereby a new expressive voice; a Renaissance. Is it too much to hope that we are on the brink, after an age of rampant mannerism, of a second Renaissance in the arts? If it is to happen, I think we must look back.”

-Scott Eggert

Wisconsin-born composer Scott Eggert (1949-  ) was educated at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, the University of Chicago and the University of Kansas. At these institutions he studied with such diverse composers as John Downey, Ralph Shapey, Easley Blackwood, Roger Sessions and John Pozdro. He has been on the faculty of Lebanon Valley College in Annville, Pennsylvania for the past twenty-five years teaching music theory and composition, and composing music in a wide variety of media and an eclectic array of styles and languages. The musical means that Eggert employs can vary from the most brutally discordant and rhythmically intricate, as in his monumental organ work, Mycenae: Graveshaft V, to the simplest and most directly tonal, as in many of the songs. Despite these disparities, Eggert’s music all has in common a structural rigor inherited from his years at Chicago with Shapey, a heartfelt lyricism grounded in song, and, often, an almost physical, dancelike exuberance. Recent work includes a Trio for Clarinet, Violin and Cello entitled, Six Wooden Blocks (2006), a four-movement Sextet (2007), and a String Duo called Songbook (2008). 

Eggert lives in Annville in a two hundred year old stone house with his partner of thirty-six years, the artist Dan Massad. When not working, the two enjoy reading, travel, gardening, puzzles, cinema, cooking, dinners with family and friends, and decorative objects of the American Arts and Crafts period.