Erik Aren Schroeder is an Italian-American composer, violinist, and musician. His musical education began in Rochester, New York, where he had lessons in violin and baroque violin at the Hochstein School of Music and the Eastman Community Music School. Undergraduate and graduate studies at the Universität Mozarteum Salzburg in baroque violin/viola, under Hiro Kurosaki, historical performance practice, under Reinhard Goebel and Domen Marinčič, and music theory, under Juliane Brandes and Marcus Aydintan, have afforded him broad expertise in the music of the past five centuries.

His compositions engage directly with historical idioms and styles, treating them as living languages suitable for contemporary expression. They include the opera buffa La Locandiera (awarded in the 2022 Mozarteum Research Competition), the oratorio The Passions (2023), and diverse chamber and orchestral works (including two violin concertos). In 2025, he was commissioned to compose music, recorded by the Mozarteum Akademieorchester, for the Austrian pavilion at the World Expo in Osaka. The same year, he was featured in the Ö1 Talentebörse, an initiative by the Austrian national radio to promote rising artists. Further commissions have come from the Stiftung Mozarteum Salzburg and the Rochester-based ensemble Publick Musick.

He is active regularly and internationally as a violinist and violist, performing with various period instrument ensembles and orchestras and collaborating with leading Early Music specialists. Since 2024, he has been employed in archival and musicological work as research assistant at the Stiftung Mozarteum. In 2025, he founded the New Classical Society in Salzburg with Paula Heise, dedicated to exploring ways of interacting with the musical past.

His interests include historical music theory, music in Georgian Britain, Neoclassicism and the Early Music revival in the twentieth century, Classical performance practice, and musical aesthetics.