Paul Salerni’s music “pulses with life, witty musical ideas and instrumental color” (The Philadelphia Inquirer), and has been described by the New York Times as “impressive” and “playful”. Henry Fogel (Fanfare) has said “It is…music that sings and dances.”

Salerni’s one-act opera Tony Caruso’s Final Broadcast, with a libretto by Dana Gioia, won the National Opera Association’s Chamber Opera Competition. In 2007. It was premiered in Los Angeles in January 2008 in a co-production by the Los Angeles Opera, OperaWorks, CSU-Northridge, and the Southern California Opera Guild. A definitive recording was released on Naxos in 2010. His second one-act, The Life and Love of Joe Coogan, is adapted from a Dick Van Dyke TV Show episode. The original screenplay was written by Carl Reiner and adapted by librettist Kate Light. Joe Coogan had its premiere in September 2010.  In March 2019, Salerni and Gioia saw the premiere of a one-act dance opera entitled Haunted. Based on a Gioia poem of the same name, it is scored for baritone, three dancers, string quartet, and percussion. On the same program, they also premiered Salerni’s setting of Gioia’s The Ballad of Jesus Ortiz. Haunted and Jesus Ortiz appear on a new Navona CD along with two other settings of Gioia’s poems (Film Noir and Prayer at Winter Solstice). 

Last season, WVIA, the NPR/PBS station in Northeast Pennsylvania commissioned a piece from Salerni to celebrate its fiftieth anniversary.  This piece, entitled Palma, is an Italian fable with text by Dana Gioia and is scored for narrator, young string players, young singers, and symphonic orchestra. It was premiered by the Northeast Pennsylvania Philharmonic on November 4. The WVIA-TV broadcast of that premiere was recently nominated for a Mid-Atlantic Emmy. Other recent orchestral commissions include the Cape Cod Symphony, San Diego Chamber Orchestra, New Haven Symphony, the Allentown Symphony, and the Lehigh Valley Chamber Orchestra.

Salerni’s chamber music and songs are widely performed. In 2022-23, Salerni was the Composer-in-Residence for the Concerts on the Slope series in Brooklyn. That series commissioned and premiered Salerni’s clarinet quintet entitled Disruption and Hope. One of Salerni’s most recent projects is called “Paul’s Song of the Week.” In 2017-18, having written 52 art songs, he decided to post a YouTube video of one of those art songs each week for a year. One of the cycles featured on the project is For Love or Money (poems by Dana Gioia). That cycle had its premiere at a concert of Salerni’s music on texts by Gioia given at Colorado College in 2016. Included in the cycle are two of Salerni’s most popular songs, Alley Cat Love Song and Money. Alley Cat Love Song was recently chosen to be included in the New Music Shelf Baritone Anthology, has been sung widely by Met mezzo Jamie Barton, and was featured at a cabaret concert at the Seoul Arts Center in 2020. Salerni’s art song production has now reached 85 in total. In 2022, a CD entitled “People, Places, and Pets” was released by Bridge Records. It features music written for the Bowers Fader Duo (Jessica Bowers, mezzo-soprano and Oren Fader, guitar). In 2023,  Film Noir, the twentieth art song Salerni has written for the Duo, was premiered in 2023 at a recital at the Tenri Cultural Institute. This year they premiered Paul’s Noah’s Scrapbook bringing their total to 26. To celebrate Salerni’s passion for art songs, his former composition students raised an endowment that both gave a prize for the best student art song but also funded an every other year concert called the Salerni Art Song Recital. In 2025, the Inaugural Recital happened and featured songs and cycles by Salerni and the members of his composition family–his teacher, Earl Kim, Kim’s teacher, Arnold Schoenberg, and Paul’s student Heather Gilligan. 

Salerni’s passion for involving young people in music is evident in his choice of subject, audience, and performers for many of his compositions. The Big Sword and the Little Broom, a suite for solo violin and orchestra, is based on an old Neapolitan fable.  Its chamber ensemble reduction, with narration by Dana Gioia, has been performed frequently in the United States and Canada in educational and family concerts; its full orchestra version has been performed at the Interlochen Summer Arts Camp, where Salerni served on the orchestral conducting faculty for six years. Salerni’s recent piece for young string orchestra and harp, Hugging the Shore, is published by Alfred. Salerni’s ballet entitled FABLES was commissioned and premiered by RIOULT New York and is also family-friendly. FABLES has been performed in all of the five boroughs of New York City as well as in numerous venues in France and Germany. The most recent performance of The Oak and the Reed from FABLES was given by the League of Composers/ISCM orchestra in May at the Dimenna Center in Manhattan. 

Salerni has been involved as founder or co-founder of three contemporary music ensembles. With Marty Brody, he helped found the Asparagus Valley Contemporary Music Ensemble and was its director in 1972-73. At Harvard in 1976, Salerni and Louis Karchin started the Harvard Group for New Music. In 1982 at Lehigh University, Salerni founded the Lehigh University Very Modern Ensemble. LUVME has given 45 concerts, commissioning new music from composers Jan Jirasek, Thomas Oboe Lee, and Bob Moran.

Salerni is the NEH Distinguished Chair in the Humanities and Professor of Music at Lehigh University, where he teaches composition, theory, and directs the Lehigh University Very Modern Ensemble (LUVME). Salerni received a BA in Music from Amherst College and a Ph.D. in composition from Harvard University, where he studied with Earl Kim. Among his other composition teachers were Fred Lerdahl, Lewis Spratlan, and Donald Wheelock. He has held composition fellowships from the Sheldon Foundation, the Charles Ives Festival, and the Pennsylvania Council for the Arts, and has been the recipient of grants from Meet the Composer and the NEA. As the leading expert on the music of his mentor Earl Kim, Salerni has a long history of collaboration as guest pianist and lecturer with the internationally acclaimed string ensemble Sejong Soloists.  He has performed Kim’s music with the ensemble in Korea, at the Kennedy Center, the 92^nd St. Y, and the Aspen Music Festival. Sejong commissioned Salerni’s arrangement of Piazzolla’s Le Grand Tango and premiered it in Carnegie’s Zankel Hall. That arrangement is published in Italy by BERBEN. In August of 2022,  Salerni lectured on Kim and coached several performances of his music as part of Sejong’s “His et Nunc” festival in Korea. Salerni and his wife, Laura Johnson, were major contributors to a full-length documentary about Kim’s life and music and appear in the documentary as a performer, coach, and as interviewees. The film entitled Earl. has been featured at several festivals and garnered numerous awards. 

A dedicated educator, Salerni is recipient of the Stabler Award, Lehigh University’s most valued acknowledgement of excellence in teaching. His service to the larger community includes participation on Fulbright Fellowship and NEA peer review panels and seven years’ service on the Board of Directors of the Suzuki Association of the Americas. He served for two years as Chair of the SAA Board.

Salerni is married to opera and stage director Laura Johnson, and often writes for and performs with their two sons, violinist Domenic (Attacca Quartet) and percussionist Miles (Philadelphia Ballet).