Leon Kirchner studied in California at the Los Angeles City College as well as at the University of California at Berkeley. He had contact there with both Arnold Schoenberg and Ernst Bloch, both of whom influenced him profoundly on his thinking about music and his composing. In 1942, because of an award from the University of California for his compositions, his further study with Roger Sessions in New York was subsidized. After a three year stint with the armed forces, he returned to the University of California, where he completed his Masters of Music. He won many compositional awards, organized and conducted several performing groups, and was an honored professor at several major universities, including Yale University, the University of Southern California, and Harvard in Boston.

In Kirchner's early life, he was very interested in the works of Hindemith, Bartok, and Stravinsky. These interests soon gave way to some of the more avant garde composers, and he even adapted some of the serial techniques of Schoenberg and Berg. However, instead of becoming a rigid follower of their practices, he assimilated their twelve tone language into his own idiom, which is a fluid, dramatic musical language with a great deal of freedom. He has composed for all varieties of forces both large and small, but his emphasis has been on music that is highly dramatic, no matter what the medium. His knowledge of the orchestra is complete, and his compositions show that he is well aware of its expressive capacities in a modern setting. His 1969 Music for Orchestra shows a talent for a dramatic approach to timbres and a colorful orchestration which borders on the impressionistic. Sensual and fluid is his 1985 Music for Twelve, with its playful use of changing timbres and juxtapositions of instrumental colors. Although for a smaller force that his larger orchestral works, he manages to create a highly dramatic composition that breathes and mutates on this piece.

He has a profound literary flair and has set such well known authors as Walt Whitman, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Emily Dickinson, and William Wordsworth to music. The story and libretto for his opera, #Lily, comes from -Henderson the Rain King, a fantastical tale that deals with moral and human dilemmas on all levels of the modern psyche. A variety of types of vocal writing and instrumental effects heighten the dramatic power of this opera. ~ Rita Laurance, Rovi