Hailed by the San Antonio Current as “consistently brilliant and impossibly cool,” conductor Troy Peters has been Music Director of YOSA (Youth Orchestras of San Antonio) since 2009. He also conducts the orchestra for the Order of the Alamo’s annual Coronation of the Queen, a Fiesta San Antonio tradition. Musical America featured him in their 2016 special issue, The MA30 Professionals of the Year: The Innovators. He is passionate about building connections across musical genres and inspiring performers to take creative risks.

Formerly Resident Conductor of the San Antonio Symphony, Peters has guest conducted many orchestras, including the Oregon Symphony, San Antonio Philharmonic, Vermont Symphony Orchestra, West Virginia Symphony Orchestra, and Round Rock Symphony. He was previously Music Director of the Vermont Youth Orchestra and Montpelier Chamber Orchestra, and conducted college orchestras at the University of Texas San Antonio (UTSA), Texas State University, and Middlebury College. He has led summer festival orchestras at Kinhaven, Curtis Summerfest, and the Sewanee Summer Music Festival, as well as All-State Orchestras in Alabama, Nebraska, and Washington.

Peters has gained international attention for his orchestral collaborations with rock musicians, including Blind Pilot, Jon Anderson (of the band Yes), and Trey Anastasio (of the band Phish), with whom he recorded two albums on Elektra Records. Working with dozens of San Antonio rock musicians, he created YOSA’s Classic Albums Live series, winner of a 2016 Centropolitan Award from Centro San Antonio and a 2016 Best of the City Award from San Antonio Magazine.

Peters conducted the world premiere recording of Daron Hagen’s Masquerade with violinist Jaime Laredo, cellist Sharon Robinson, and the Vermont Symphony Orchestra, on Bridge Records. Among the other soloists with whom he has collaborated are Branford Marsalis, Midori, Edgar Meyer, Time for Three, Michelle Cann, and Richard Stoltzman. His work has been the subject of national media attention from CBS Sunday Morning, National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition, Symphony, and The New Yorker.

Awarded a Vermont Arts Council Citation of Merit in 2009, he has also been honored with eight ASCAP Awards for Adventurous Programming of Contemporary Music and has conducted more than three-dozen world premieres. A popular lecturer, he has presented pre-concert talks for the Philadelphia Orchestra, Carnegie Hall, Vermont Symphony Orchestra, and San Antonio Symphony, as well as acclaimed talks at TEDx San Antonio, Pecha Kucha San Antonio, and Texas Public Radio’s Worth Repeating.

Peters is also active as a composer, where his honors include the Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and grants from Meet the Composer and the Rockefeller Foundation. He holds degrees from the Curtis Institute of Music and the University of Pennsylvania, where his primary compositional mentors were Ned Rorem and George Crumb. Born in 1969 in Greenock, Scotland (of American parents), Peters grew up in Tacoma, Washington, and lives in San Antonio.