Eric Scheider

Eric Scheider is the Interim Director of the Converse Symphony Orchestra. He is also the director and conductor of Four Seasons Chamber Orchestra in Western North Carolina, and served as the Interim Music Director of the Hendersonville Symphony Orchestra for the 2021-22 season. He founded and directed the Echo Early Music Festival/Echo Cooperative in Asheville, served as the music director of the Hendersonville Symphony Youth Orchestras, and has guest conducted extensively for festival, orchestral and musical theater performances at the secondary, collegiate, and adult levels.

As a cellist, Scheider has performed across the Western Carolinas and East Tennessee with regional professional orchestras (Hendersonville, Spartanburg, Asheville, Brevard, Greenville, Johnson City, Piedmont Chamber), theaters (Flat Rock Playhouse, Asheville Lyric Opera, HART, ACT), and beyond, including tours of Italy and China. He is the cellist of the Café String Quartet. He also performs and records for a variety of film, folk, and rock projects, including for MTV Films, NPR Music, WNCW radio, datytrotter.com, and Echo Mountain Studios.

An active arranger and award-winning composer, Scheider has completed around 150 original works and arrangements for orchestral and chamber ensembles. He has premiered new work by composers such as Dan Forrest, Hwaen Chu-qui, Anthony Moore, Chappell Kingsland, Patrick Littlejohn, and many others, and arranged for the Hendersonville Symphony, Spartanburg Philharmonic, Graham Sharp, and Julian Pinelli.

Scheider is a committed educator, currently leading the orchestral, choir, and theater programs at FernLeaf Community Charter School in Fletcher, NC, where he previously taught elementary music. He was the orchestra director at North Henderson High School and Apple Valley Middle School, and has been a guest educator for school, collegiate and youth orchestra programs across WNC and upstate SC.

A native of Buffalo, NY, Scheider holds the B.A. with highest honors in Philosophy from the University or Rochester, and has completed graduate and undergraduate coursework in conducting, education and performance at the Eastman School of Music, the Berklee School of Music, several campuses of the universities of North Carolina and North Dakota, and the University of the Arts. His conducting teachers include Neil Varon, Dennis Fisher, Ken Kiesler, Sarah Ioannides, and Mark Scatterday.