Bern Herbolsheimer

His final premieres were his chamber opera The Quartet at Carnegie Hall and Gold and Silver in Steven Soderbergh's HBO hit series The Knick. He passed away shortly before the UK premiere of his Seven Last Words performed by The Willow Concert in 2017.

Herbolsheimer died at his home in Seattle on January 13, 2016.

His Symphony No. 1 was premiered by the Florida Symphony under conductor Kenneth Jean. Other orchestral music was premiered by the Seattle Symphony, Northwest Symphony Orchestra, and Music Today in New York under the direction of Gerard Schwarz. His vocal and choral works were performed in Portugal, Spain, Germany, France, Italy, Australia, South America, Canada, Norway, Russia, Hungary, Japan, and throughout the United States. According to the Seattle Weekly, who named him as Best (Classical) Composer in 2005, "no Seattle composer has a more assured and polished craft than Herbolsheimer. His choral writing — and there's a lot of it — is luminous and subtle".

Herbolsheimer served on the music faculty of Seattle's Cornish College, where he taught composition-related classes and held a private studio, and the University of Washington, where he taught graduate classes in the voice program. At the end of the 2000–2001 school year he was selected as the Outstanding Teacher of Music at Cornish College.

Bern Herbolsheimer received recognition throughout the United States and Europe for over 500 works ranging from ballet to symphonic, operatic, chamber and choral works. His numerous major commissions and premieres included ballets for the Frankfurt Ballet, the Atlanta Ballet, the Pacific Northwest Ballet, and the Eugene Ballet. His first opera, Aria da Capo, won first prize in the National Opera Association's New Opera Competition. Mark Me Twain, his second opera, was commissioned and premiered in 1993 by the Nevada Opera for its Silver Anniversary season. "The opera is filled with attractive, dramatic, often eloquent music ... it could become an American work of genuine significance."

Bern Herbolsheimer (September 2, 1948 – January 13, 2016) was an American composer.