Mr. Leslie de Melcher was born and educated in Paris but claims that it is not his fault. He lived and worked in New York City for the past 20 years, and recently moved to Toronto. He holds a Post-Graduate degree in Philosophy from the Universite de Paris(Sorbonne) and an advanced degree in Composition from the Ecole Normale de Musique de Paris, where he won first prize for composition. In addition, he attended Pierre Boulez's seminars at the College de France and workshops at the IRCAM.

Musical Highlights (digest) include:

· A chamber orchestra work commissioned by the French Ministry of Culture. This should speak for itself if you ever lived in Paris
· His first string quartet and brass quintet have been published by Symphony Land Music Publishing Company. Famous for having Michel Legrand (who?) amongst its illustrious catalogue and whose agent – in recognition of Melcher’s work – offered Legrand’s (dubious) recording of Satie.
· Film credits include the score for ‘Une Licorne de l'Oeil’ and numerous scores for television commercials and promotional videos in the U.S. – All absolutely hilarious stuff.
· ‘CANUM IV’, an electro-acoustic piece – as we called those then – premièred at the Contemporary Music Festival in Lyons, France and is still alive in analog state.
· ‘The Sprit of our Time’, a cantata for organ, mixed choir, children's choir, soprano solo, piano and strings, premièred at Central Presbyterian Church in New York City, which was praised by all including a famous publisher who refused to publish it: it had “too many instruments”
· ‘L'Appolyon’ for enormous orchestra, spent some time in Austria.
· ‘Nome’ for virtuoso brass quintet visited a few places including Tangier, (Morocco-Africa to be specific)
· ‘Mad.Brass’ for loud, noisy “with many right-wrong-notes” for brass orchestra, percussion and children's choir – In celebration of New York City’s Madison Square Park. Premièred with an impressive array of VIPs, and so many speeches that the composer cannot remember if the piece was actually performed.
· ‘Monday Nights’ for a large Wind Orchestra. Premièred in Westport, Mass. The sea was just a bit too far away to drown in. 

You are essentially lucky that this was just a “Highlight”…

Melcher’s work has been performed here and there and around the planet, but he is often unsure of what and when – such as his Electronic Pieces “Alph” (Amsterdam 1983 or stuff like whatever happened to the other CANUMs, if IV is the only one left?)

Leslie Melcher’s current work-in-progress is “The Crystal Dome” an award winning Opera for digital music / analog instruments, laser lights, digital animation (by the famed p/ Lipinski) mixed choir, live string ensemble, piano and actors. The Crystal Dome will be available soon – maybe – or not - as a Web Serialization (12 episodes per season) thanks to recent and generous backing and promotional support by the Sony corporation (in words only).

His latest performed commissioned work: ‘Alone’ for digital electronics, children voices and mixed choir was his first public foray into digital music / digital animation (a litmus test of for his grandiose Opera-in-progress) and was premiered in Toronto (April 2004) with a very bad sound system – (The volume was so low that only sub-sonic rodents and bats on Dexedrine could hear it) in effect killing the composition’s design to enhance musical experience by adding digital film made especially to follow the music) all this due to the profound stupidity of the 26-year-old-no-nothing-experience-not-needed local theatre sound “engineer-without-schooling”. All of this whilst his anti-war piece ‘Delusions’ for reverbed electric guitars, voice loops by President re-elect of the U.S.A. Bush Jr. and digital filters, is touring Europe's festivals without any supervision whatsoever and newer works are following this bad example taking quantum superposition highways to nowhere. Mr. Melcher has recently worked on Hebrew Cantorial Chants (with the help of Hazzan B. Maissner of Central Synagogue of Moscow in Mali - no, sorry, Toronto) much to the dismay of the members of the Nobrosky Shul (although they do not know anything about it, yet).