John Silva

John has composed music in a wide variety of styles and instrumentations, but he primarily composes in a modern classical style for solo instruments and small ensembles.

John’s compositional style tends to be meditative and harmonically colorful. He has stayed away from atonal, serial, and heavily dissonant music and has preferred to find musical beauty in the contrast between consonance and dissonance. He appreciates other modern composers who write contemporary classical music with fresh tonality, such as Easley Blackwood (his later music) and Lowell Liebermann.