Dr. Bryce Seliger brings a wealth of expertise to the Palm Beach Symphony and is delighted to serve the Palm Beach County community. Her noteworthy body of work has been in arts administration, music performance, and music education, with a strategic focus on community engagement, outreach, and innovative arts initiatives.
For a decade, she held the post as Associate Professor of Music and Director of Orchestral Activities at Pacific University in Oregon that included serving as Founder, Music Director and Conductor of the Pacific Philharmonic. Prior to this while residing Florida for the first time, she served as Director of Orchestral Studies at Florida Atlantic University and Music Director/Conductor of the FAU Symphony Orchestra, Co-Conductor of the FAU Wind Ensemble, Associate Conductor of the Florida Youth Orchestra, Guest Conductor of the Boca Raton Philharmonic Symphonia, Music Critic for the Palm Beach Daily News, and Pre-Concert Lecturer for the Symphony of Americas. Moreover, she instructed courses at the University of South Carolina, Claflin University, and Columbia College in South Carolina. Collectively, in addition to large ensembles, she has taught courses in music history (Antiquity to Contemporary periods) plus music appreciation and the history of rock and roll as well as flute, music theory, sight singing – ear training, music education, and conducting. She also served as a coach of chamber ensembles and supervisor of senior recitals, lecture-recitals, and thesis papers. Leading up to joining the Palm Beach Symphony, Bryce held an arts administration position at Florida International University’s Wertheim School of Music.
Palm Beach Illustrated hailed her as an “exceptional performer” and The Oregonian as an “ambitious conductor….[that] brings a very high level of expertise to the podium.” She has conducted many professional, youth, and university orchestras, bands, choirs, and acclaimed soloists both domestically and internationally in performances and as a clinician; and has performed live as a flutist and conductor as well as a guest speaker on multiple Classical radio stations including NPR.
Bryce has enjoyed performing an eclectic array of rock music with orchestras from The Beatles to Bruno Mars. She produced a “Symphony Rocks” concert with the iconic band Kansas and her own Pacific Philharmonic. As an avid promoter of contemporary music, she has performed dozens of world and state premieres including film music for Citadel Records and live documentary music at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Her other area of expertise has included performing multi-state premieres of Gustav Mahler’s re-orchestrations of other composers’ works (known as Retuschen). Bryce has presented her scholarly research on these and other topics at major music conferences across the country. To date, she is the recipient of over twenty professional development grants that have supported her varied research and performance projects. Six times she has been named a Finalist for The American Prize Competitions in Orchestral Conducting, Concert Programming, and Orchestral Performance.
The College Music Society named her the winner of their Education in Music and Community Engagement Award for developing and securing funding for the first and only String Project site in Oregon, a national music education and community engagement initiative in which her university music students instructed K-12 preparatory students in classroom and private lesson settings under the pedagogical instruction and supervision of a master teacher.
While training in conducting, she studied with acclaimed American conductors David Zinman, Murry Sidlin, Stanley DeRusha, Donald Portnoy, Russel Mikkelson, and Grant Cooper. Additionally, she participated in masterclasses with Jorma Panula, Paul Vermel, Christopher Wilkins, Larry Rachleff, Victoria Bond, Philip Greenberg, Gerhardt Samuel, and James Smith. As a flutist, she studied under the tutelage of Palm Beach Symphony’s Principal Flutist Nadine Asin as well as Karen Moratz, Susan Royal, and Constance Lane. She won prestigious fellowships, grants and scholarships to pursue her musical training at the Aspen Music Festival’s American Academy of Conducting, the Conductors Institute of South Carolina, the Spoleto Music Festival USA, a Conductors Guild Workshop, the Sessione Senese per la Musica Summer Music Institute in Italy, the Dimitris Mitropoulos International Conducting Competition in Greece, and all three universities she attended. Bryce possesses a Bachelor of Music in flute performance from the State University of New York at Fredonia, a Master of Music in instrumental conducting with an orchestral emphasis from Butler University and a Doctor or Musical Arts in instrumental conducting with an orchestral emphasis from the University of South Carolina.