Harvey Sollberger has been active as a composer, flutist, and conductor. He studied composition with Jack Beeson and Otto Luening and flute with Julia Denecke, Betty Bang Mather, and Samuel Baron. His compositions have been performed by the New York Philharmonic, the San Francisco Symphony, and ensembles throughout Europe, Asia, and the Americas. Commissions and grants have come from the Fromm Foundation, the Koussevitzky Foundation, the Walter W. Naumberg Foundation, the NEA and various state arts councils, the Martha Baird Rockefeller Fund for Music, and the Guggenheim Foundation. He has been Resident Composer at the American Academy in Rome and Composer-in-Residence for the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players and Red Cedar Chamber Music.

In 1962, Sollberger was a co-founder of the Group for Contemporary Music, the first contemporary music ensemble in residence at an American university. He has premiered many new flute works, including Davidovsky’s Synchronisms No. 1, and his conducting credits include performances with the San Francisco Symphony, the San Diego Symphony. and the premiere of Elliott Carter’s Syringa. From 1975 to 1983, he directed the Flute Farm, an intensive course for the study of contemporary flute literature. The composer of more than 80 works (40 of them featuring the flute), Sollberger has amassed a discography of more than 130 commercially released recordings. In 2014, Harvey Sollberger donated his collection of scores, sketches, programs, articles, recordings, and letters to the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.