Conductor Timothy Weiss has gained critical acclaim for his performances and brave, adventurous programming throughout the United States and abroad.

Weiss is committed to exploring the connections within and between pieces in his performances and searching for similarities of voice between different composers from different genres, periods, and backgrounds. His programs often present rare and revealing juxtapositions, offering a broad range of works from the minimalists to the maximalists, from the old to the new, and from the mainstream to the unheard of. His repertoire in contemporary music is vast and fearless, including masterworks, very recent compositions, and an impressive number of premieres and commissions. He has been a recipient of the Adventurous Programming Award from the League of American Orchestras.

For more than two decades, Weiss has been music director of the Oberlin Contemporary Music Ensemble, and has brought the group to a level of artistry and virtuosity in performance that rivals the finest new music groups. After a recent concert with the ensemble at the Cleveland Museum of Art, ClevelandClassical.com published, “Too frequently, new music gets performed without enough preparation. These meticulously rehearsed performances were confident and settled, yet sounded completely fresh. Any composer would be thrilled to have their music treated with the level of care that Timothy Weiss and the CME lavished on the four pieces we heard on Saturday. Also too frequently, the varying instrumentation of new pieces makes for endless and chaotic stage shifts, but this concert was planned and executed with impressive efficiency.”

A committed educator, Weiss is professor of conducting and chair of the Division of Contemporary Music at Oberlin Conservatory of Music, where he helped create and mentor the ensembles eighth blackbird and International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE). He also served as music director for the Newark Granville Symphony Orchestra, a professional ensemble in the Columbus, Ohio, area for 10 years. Weiss remains active as a guest conductor with the BBC Scottish Symphony in Glasgow, the Britten Sinfonia in London, the Melbourne Symphony in Australia, ICE, and the Detroit Chamber Winds and Strings. He holds degrees from the Royal Conservatory of Music in Brussels, Northwestern University, and the University of Michigan.