Paul Schoenfield is one of the most important American composers of the late 20th century. To call him brilliant, as the press and his respected colleagues often do, is understatement.  It is likely that no other composer active today was granted a doctorate in musical arts by age 22. For Schoenfield, that followed study with the distinguished composer Robert Muczynski at the University of Arizona after his undergraduate work at Carnegie Mellon University. And all this while studying mathematics as well.  Academic success in the American university system is rarely conferred on the same composer in the concert halls. However, Schoenfields’ music has been widely embraced by both music lovers and academics. Every piece he writes dazzles the listener with a sense of mastery, of musical fluency, of delight in creating works of memorable individuality.  His distinctive voice has been tapped for commissions by such organizations as the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Fund, the Bush Foundation, Meet the Composer, and Chamber Music America, and his music has been performed by many of the nations’ leading ensembles, including the New York Philharmonic, Minnesota Orchestra, National Symphony and the Seattle Symphony.

A sense of finding meaning in absurdity often surfaces in Schoenfields' work. In his Four Parables , for piano and orchestra, for example, he dedicates each movement to an actual, personal life encounter.  As the inspiration for one movement, debate about whether an aged quadriplegic murderer should be released from prison sends Schoenfield’s mind scampering toward what the composers calls "the teleological argument of why anything exists at all, and the irreverent feeling that perhaps we are in some cosmic zoo performing inane acts for our spectators."  At the point of departure for another movement, Schoenfield is entranced by an elderly man who slips into senility murmuring, "Life is tantamount to a burlesque show."  And speaking of burlesque, another of his pieces is titled Vaudeville and sports such names as Klezmers, and Carmen Rivera.

Eclecticism emerged as a vital force among artists of the post modern era, though many who embraced it seem to have reveled principally in the shock value of startling the audience.  Schoenfield is indeed an "eclectic" composer, deriving obvious inspiration from such diverse vocabularies as jazz, ragtime, blues, African American spirituals, Tin Pan Alley tunes, and traditional Jewish music. Yet his pieces invariably show respect for their sources, even while turning their essence into something original.  A critic writing in the Chicago Tribune went so far as to say that his music "doesn’t so much mimic American musical idioms as give new life to them."

 The three movements of the virtuosic piano trio, Café Music, show their clear connection to earlier American styles:  ragtime in the opening Allegro, a syncopated blues in the Andante moderato, evolving into a meltingly beautiful, musical theater style Broadway love ballad in the movements central section, a sort of Gershwinesque cakewalk at Presto speed.  Says Schoenfield of this irresistible trio:

"The idea of composer Café Music first came to me in 1985 after sitting in one night for the pianist of the house at Murray’s’ Restaurant in Minneapolis.  My intention was to write a kind of high-class, dinner-music music which could be played at a restaurant, but might also, just barely find its way into a concert hall."