Composer and pianist Sean Friar grew up in Los Angeles, where his first musical experiences were in rock and blues piano improvisation. His music keeps in touch with the energy and communicative directness of those musical roots, now along with an expansive and exploratory classical sensibility that is “refreshingly new and solidly mature… and doesn’t take on airs, but instead takes joy in the process of discovery [and] in the continual experience of suspense and surprise that good classical music has always championed.” (Slate Magazine).  

He regularly composes for ensembles within and outside traditional concert music. His output ranges from works for orchestra and chamber ensembles to a junk car percussion concerto, music for laptop orchestra, and microtonal piano duo. He has received commissions from the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Berlin Philharmonic Scharoun Ensemble, American Composers Orchestra, Alarm Will Sound, Ensemble Modern, Cabrillo Festival, New York Youth Symphony, Redlands Symphony, NOW Ensemble, the Eastman Wind Ensemble, the Curtis Institute, and Present Music. His music has been featured at venues and festivals around the world including Aspen, Bang on a Can, Bowdoin, Cabrillo, Carlsbad, Carnegie Hall, GAUDEAMUS, International Young Composers Meeting, ISSUE Project Room, the Kitchen, Le Poisson Rouge, NASA, Norfolk, Nuova Consonanza, Roulette, SONIC, the Venice Biennale, Walt Disney Concert Hall, and the World Saxophone Congress.

A winner of the 2011 Rome Prize, Friar has received awards from Copland House, the Fromm Foundation at Harvard University, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Chamber Music America, four ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Awards, Composer’s Inc., New Music USA, the US Army Band, and was a finalist for the GAUDEAMUS Prize. Recordings of his music can be found on labels including New Amsterdam Records, Innova Recordings, Parma Recordings, Vox Novus, and Crescent Phase Records. In late 2021, his album-length composition for NOW Ensemble, Before and After, was released on New Amsterdam Records to international critical acclaim, with an album release show at Le Poisson Rouge in New York.

Also active as a pianist, Sean regularly tours his own music and other contemporary works with his two duo projects with saxophonist Jeff Siegfried and Estonian bassoonist Martin Kuuskmann. In 2024, he released an album with Siegfried entitled Shades on Ravello Records. He plans to release an album with Kuuskmann for amplified bassoon, piano, and effects pedals in 2025.

Friar is Chair of Composition at the Lamont School of Music at the University of Denver. He also directs summer composition programs at Sunset ChamberFest (Los Angeles), Suncoast Composer Fellowship Program (Sarasota), Lamont Summer Academy (Denver), and previously at the Idyllwild Arts Academy. Before coming to the University of Denver, he was Assistant Professor of Practice in Composition at the University of Southern California Thornton School of Music, and before that, Lecturer of Composition at the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music. He holds a Ph.D. in Music Composition from Princeton University and undergraduate degrees in Music and Psychology from UCLA. His principal teachers were Paul Chihara, Paul Lansky, Steven Mackey, and Dmitri Tymoczko.