Nathan Shields is a founding member of ECCE.  His compositions have been performed in such locations as the Wellesley Composers' Conference, Boston's Jordan Hall, Julliard's Paul Hall, and the Cathedral of Saint-Severin in Paris. He recently received his second BMI award, as well as the Toru Takemitsu prize from the Japan Society of Boston.

Shields is a graduate student at Juilliard, where he studies with Milton Babbitt, and is a recipient of the Steuermann Memorial Prize and the Marvin Hamlisch Scholarship.  He earned his B.M. from the New England Conservatory, studying composition with Lee Hyla and David Rakowski, and has participated in such festivals as the Wellesley Composers Conference, the European American Musical Alliance, the Boston University Tanglewood Institute, and the Gamper Festival of Contemporary Music.  

Shields was initially trained as a cellist and chamber musician. Although he has written for a wide variety of ensembles, his most characteristic works are densely woven, highly dramatic chamber works, with a debt to both the purity of Renaissance sacred music and the anguish of early Modernism.  His music is elusive and dark, and can be at once brutal and delicate. In sensibility and form it is distinctly modern, yet it springs from an esthetic principle that is deeply indebted to Wagnerian Romanticism -- the belief that art can reveal a transcendent reality, and that music can express truths, sublime or horrible, that lie beyond the reach of language and reason.