Carl Walter Roskott (March 4, 1953 - June 18, 2008) was an American composer, conductor and academic. He served as associate professor of music at Northern Illinois University and the University of Virginia, and as associate conductor at the Eastern Music Festival in Greensboro, North Carolina. He studied at the Peabody Conservatory of Music and New England Conservatory of Music; his principal teachers included Leonard Bernstein, Gunther Schuller, Sheldon Morgenstern, Leo Mueller, Richard Pittman and Michael Tilson Thomas.

Raised in Phoenix, Maryland, Carl Walter Roskott (1953­–2008) developed an early penchant for conducting and composition at Peabody Conservatory Preparatory School. Skipping his senior year of high school to enter New England Conservatory, Roskott studied conducting with Richard Pittman and composition with Robert Cogan and Donald Martino, although Gunther Schuller was his greatest influence there as a mentor in both fields.

Winner of New England Conservatory’s 1975 Chadwick Medal, Roskott completed a master’s degree at Peabody Conservatory in one year. He spent two summers at Tanglewood on a Leonard Bernstein Fellowship—first as a composer in 1973, then as a conductor (and Dimitri Mitropoulos Award winner) in 1979, during which he met and befriended Bernstein himself. Roskott directed orchestral programs at Northern Illinois University (1980–1991) and the University of Virginia (1991–2005); his longest lasting position, however, was at the Eastern Music Festival in Greensboro, North Carolina, where he spent twenty-eight summers: first as a student, then as assistant conductor, and then for twenty years as conductor of the Guilford Symphony Orchestra (1978–1997).

It was for the Eastern Music Festival that he wrote almost all his compositions. While earlier works of the 1970s included atonal explorations of spatial acoustics, Roskott later turned away from contemporary avant-garde practices and embraced a more tonal style in the 1980s and beyond, influenced by composers such as Mahler, Tchaikovsky, and Stravinsky, whose works he particularly revered and routinely conducted.