Alan Fletcher is president and CEO of the Aspen Music Festival and School and a respected composer. He has studied with distinguished composers such as Roger Sessions, Milton Babbitt, Edward T. Cone, and Paul Lansky, and pianists Robert Helps and Jacob Lateiner. He has won numerous composing awards and commissions, including recent commissions for the Pittsburgh Symphony and the National Gallery of Art. Fletcher lectures nationally and internationally on music, and is published widely on musical and cultural issues. He gives frequent seminars for the Aspen Institute on a wide range of musical and cultural topics. He chaired the 1997 Salzburg Seminar, Music for a New Millennium: The Classical Genre in Contemporary Society.