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Nicholas Scarim (born 1952, Chicago, Illinois) is an American composer.

Biography
Scarim grew up in the Chicago area, eventually attending Highland Park High School and studying music theory and improvisation with Chicago jazz legend Joe Daly. He subsequently earned a degree in composition at the Chicago Musical College of Roosevelt University, where he studied theory with Ralph Dodds, and composition with Robert Lombardo and Wilfred Josephs. After entering the conservatory he became increasingly involved with classical music, gradually moving away from jazz, although his film scores from the late 70s and early 80s do contain some jazz. His output includes opera, symphonic and chamber music.

Works
Shortly after moving to New York City in 1977, he began work on several operas: Sumidagawa, based on the Japanese Noh drama of the same name; The Father with a libretto based on the August Strindberg play; and The Tiger of Chungshan based on a Chinese folktale, for family audiences. All three operas received performances during 1979 and 1980 in New London, Philadelphia and New York.

In the early 80s, he was a pioneer in writing music theory tutorial software for personal computers such as the TRS80, Commodore64 and Atari800. Contacts in the computer world led to his writing scores for some of the biggest selling computer games in those early years of personal computers, such as Spy vs Spy and Boulderdash. By 1985 he had “retired” from the computer industry and returned full–time to composing and teaching. In that same year, he won a CINE award for his score to the documentary film "Men, Marble and Machines."

In the late 80s and 1990s Scarim produced several large scale chamber works such as his Piano Quintet, and completed his Serenade for Guitar and Orchestra, as well as his first and second symphonies. In 1993-94 he was commissioned by ARC Productions to create the musical “Wings of Fire” based on a George Bernard Shaw play for productions in California and New England.

In the 1990s he became increasingly involved with arts education, both in research and in practice. Between 1993 and 1995, while working on music education residencies funded by both Meet the Composer and by the Annenberg Foundation's Center for Arts Education, he participated in a multi-year research project on the assessment of arts instruction funded by the National Endowment for the Arts.

In 2000 he wrote "A Simple Melody" on a commission from Carnegie Hall. The piece was designed to enable schoolchildren to attend a concert and sing and play along with a symphony orchestra. The program was eventually to run for eleven years and involve regional orchestras in 16 American and Canadian cities and almost half a million children.