Contact
*  Composer
*  Educator
*  Performer

Monte Keene Pishny-Floyd was born in 1941 in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. B.Mus., Piano Performance, Oklahoma City University (1964); M.Mus., Composition, University of Oklahoma (1965); Ph. D., Composition, Eastman School of Music. There he studied composition with Bernard Rogers and piano with Eugene List. He also studied composition independently with David Diamond. From 1968 to 1971, he taught at St. Mary’s College, South Bend, Indiana, and in 1971 immigrated to Canada to teach Composition, Piano, Theory, Music History, and other courses at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. He left academia in 1993 to become a full-time composer and writer. He is now president of the Saskatoon Composers’ Performance Society. Pishny-Floyd is an Associate Composer of the Canadian Music Centre, a member of the Canadian League of Composers, and the Edmonton Composers’ Concert Society. He is married to a musician, Annette Floyd (M.Mus., ESM, 1970), who has presented some of Pishny-Floyd’s most important premieres and who also is his editor and calligraphist. They have four daughters.

Pishny-Floyd’s music is performed and broadcast throughout Canada and the United States, Europe, Israel, South America, and Japan. Some highlights are: Fantasy and Fugue for Orchestra (1963, Oklahoma City Symphony, 1963, Guy Fraser Harrison, conductor); Theme and Variations for Orchestra (1966, Eastman-Rochester Philharmonic, Walter Hendl, conductor, and the Baltimore Symphony, Elliot Gaulkin, conductor, both, 1966); Variations on Themes of Stravinsky (1982, commission, CBC, for Saskatoon’s Centennial, Saskatoon Symphony, David Gray, conductor, national broadcast, CBC’s Mostly Music,1982); Suite for Small Orchestra (1970, Vancouver, B.C, broadcast/performance, Vancouver CBC Chamber Orchestra, Daniel Swift, conductor, 1990); Partita for Piano, Winds, and Percussion (1978, a CBC commission inaugurating CBC-FM Saskatchewan, national broadcast, Two New Hours, 1978); Sonata for Unaccompanied Viola (1993, commission and premiere, Rivka Golani: Edmonton New Music Festival, 1994, broadcast nationally, CBC); Sonata for Double Bass and Piano (1992, commission and premiere, David Ruby: BassWorks ’93, Saskatoon, and Europe, with Annette Floyd, pianist, International Double Bass Festival, Avignon, France, 1994, broadcast, French radio; Japanese premiere, Kazuo Okuda); Concerto for Saxophone and Strings (1996, commission, Paul Brodie: Brodie, Saskatoon Youth Orchestra, premiere, inaugural concert, Saskatoon Composers’ Concert Society, 1997); Piobaireachd (Pibroch) for Organ (1996), Dr. Stillman Matheson, premiere, 1996, Edmonton, Alberta, and Legnica and Warsaw, Poland for the 1996 Conversatorium Organowe); An Evening With Harmony and Charlie (1998, theatre-piece based on words and music of Charles Ives, premiere, Pishny-Floyd, piano, with actors Boguslaw Semotiuk, Annette Floyd, and Troy Milleker, Lodz, Poland, 1998); Omega:Epilog (1989, commission, premiere, University of Saskatchewan Wind Orchestra, Marvin Eckroth, conductor: the international 1989 W.A.S.B.E. conference, Kerkrade, Holland); Saxophone Quartet No. 1 (1982, 1982 World Saxophone Congress, Nuremburg, Germany); Saxophone Quartet No. 2 (1985, 1985 World Saxophone Congress, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, commissioned and premiered by the Saskatoon Saxophone Quartet); Three Unaccompanied Pieces for Alto Saxophone (2005, 2006 Universität der Künste, Berlin; Academy of Music, Lodz, Poland; Club of the 13 Muses, Szczecin, Poland).
 

Back to Tonus Vivus Members’ Biographies – Index