AARON JAY KERNIS (b 1960 )
Pulitzer, GRAMMY and Grawemeyer Award-winning composer Aaron Jay Kernis is one of America’s most performed and honoured composers. He has been commissioned by the world’s preeminent performing organizations and artists, from the New York Philharmonic to the Symphonies of San Francisco, Dallas, Detroit, Toronto, and Melbourne, and the Walt Disney Company to the Rose Center for Earth and Space at New York’s American Museum of Natural History, and soloists Renée Fleming, James Ehnes, Joshua Bell, Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, and Sharon Isbin.
He received Northwestern University’s Nemmers Prize and is a member of the Classical Music Hall of Fame and American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is the Workshop Director of the Nashville Symphony’s Composer Lab; was new music adviser to the Minnesota Orchestra, with which he co-founded and directed its Composer Institute for 15 years; and serves on Yale’s composition faculty.
He has conducted in cities including Rome, Washington, and Portland. Leta Miller’s book-length portrait of Kernis and his work was published in 2014 by University of Illinois Press. His music can be heard on the Nonesuch, Naxos, Signum, Koch, Onyx and Argo labels, among others.
|