Paul Frehner is a composer and an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Music at Western University, where he teaches composition, orchestration, electroacoustic music and is the Director of CEARP, the faculty’s state-of-the-art electroacoustic music production studio. Born in Montreal in 1970, Paul Frehner completed his Doctorate in music in 2004 at McGill University where he studied composition with Denys Bouliane. During his Master’s degree at McGill, completed in 1998, he studied composition with Brian Cherney and orchestration with Bengt Hambraeus. Over the course of his career, Frehner has enjoyed great success in composing music for the concert stage in a wide variety of contexts. Ranging from expressionistic and evocative to exciting and gritty, his works often reflect the existential and experiential aspects of human life, both in society and in humanity’s complex relationship with the natural world. 

Paul Frehner has received numerous international and national awards for his compositions, including First Prize in the Jeunesses Musicales World Orchestra's International Composition Competition for Overture 2000, First Prize in the Prague Philharmonia’s Symphony of the Third Millennium Composition Competition (2001) for his orchestral work Elixirs, Second Prize in the Genesis Prizes for Opera (2003), a Finalist Award in the Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra’s International Composers Award competition (2004) and the Claude Vivier National Award in the Montreal Symphony Orchestra’s International Composition Competition for Lila (2007). In 2012 he was awarded the K.M. Hunter Artist Award in Classical Music administered by the Ontario Arts Council. In 2019 he was nominated by the OAC for the inaugural Johanna Metcalf Prize in Classical Music.