Described as “vividly colored” (The New York Times) and “exhilarating” (The Philadelphia Inquirer), Jeremy Gillʼs music has earned him residencies and fellowships with the Bogliasco Foundation (2017), Chautauqua Opera (2016), Copland House (2015), American Opera Projects (2013–14), and the MacDowell Colony (2013), as well as major grants from New Music USA (2015) and Chamber Music America (2011). In November 2015, Jeremy traveled to Havana, Cuba as part of a select group of composers assembled by the American Composers Forum as the first US Artist Delegation to the Havana Contemporary Music Festival, a historic trip documented by ACF and National Public Radio
During the 2017–18 season the Harrisburg Symphony will premiere Ainulindalë, a tone poem for large orchestra based on J. R. R. Tolkienʼs creation myth from his posthumous The Silmarillion. The virtuoso vocal sextet Variant 6 will premiere Six Pensées de Pascal, Jeremyʼs setting of text fragments by the 17th-century polymath, in both Boston and Philadelphia. In New York City, Chris Grymes will premiere Jeremyʼs second clarinet sonata with Jeremy at the piano, as the highlight of a concert at National Sawdust showcasing works composed for Chris over the years. Finally, Rubinstein Prize-winning pianist Ching-Yun Hu will premiere Fantasie-Transcription: “Wie selig sind doch die” at the National Theater in Taipei, Taiwan, and subsequently tour with the work throughout Asia, Europe, and the States. Among Jeremyʼs major composition projects for the 2017–18 season is a four-hand piano concerto for the Polonsky-Weiss Duo to be premiered in the fall of 2019 by the Buffalo Philharmonic under Music Director JoAnn Falletta.
Other performances of note during the 2017–18 season include a new production of Jeremyʼs 2014 chamber opera Letters from Quebec to Providence in the Rain at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, his 2009 song cycle Helian featuring baritone Jonathan Hays, with Jeremy at the piano, at the Museo dʼArte Orientale Chiossone in Genoa, Italy and at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin, as well as several performances of his 2007 piano set Book of Hours by pianist Katelyn Bouska in Philadelphia and on her concert tours in the northeast.
During the summer of 2016 Jeremy was the first Composer in Residence with Chautauqua Opera, where three new works of his were premiered: Rose, composed for mezzo-soprano Tesia Kwarteng and setting a text by Ann Patchett; Ladiesʼ Voices, composed for soprano Chelsea Miller, Chautauqua Operaʼs 16 Studio Artists in various speaking roles, and accompanied by full orchestra, setting the short play of the same name by Gertrude Stein; and The Invisible City, composed for countertenor Patrick Terry and setting a text by Italo Calvino. While in residence with Chautauqua Opera, Jeremy simultaneously served as cover conductor to General and Artistic Director Steven Osgood on La Traviata and The Mikado and as a member of the coaching and accompanying staff.
The remainder of the 2016–17 season included the world premiere of Jeremyʼs Duo for Violin and Piano featuring Peter Sirotin and Ya-Ting Chang of the Mendelssohn Trio, commissioned to honor the 35th anniversary of Market Square Concerts, as well as performances of Helian featuring Jonathan Hays and Copeland Woodruff at National Sawdust in NYC, Parabasis (2006) featuring the Chameleon Arts Ensemble at the Goethe-Institut in Boston, and multiple performances of the suite from Capriccio (2012) featuring the Parker Quartet. His chamber opera Letters from Quebec to Providence in the Rain was presented during the 2017 National Opera Associationʼs Conference in Santa Barbara as one of three finalists for NOAʼs Dominick Argento Chamber Opera Prize.
During the 2015–16 season the Dallas Symphony Orchestra premiered Jeremyʼs oboe concerto Serenada Concertante, featuring DSO principal Erin Hannigan and conducted by music director Jaap van Zweden, which The Dallas Morning News lauded as “replete with imaginative textures and interplays between soloist and orchestra…By turns stringing out lyric lines, weaving arabesques and exploding in flourishes and runs.”
Two new recordings of Jeremyʼs music will be released in 2017. Paean, Epitaph, and Dithyramb (2008), featuring the NYC-based ensemble Third Sound, will be released by Innova Recordings on an album documenting the first US Artist Delegation to Havana, Cuba. And Boston Modern Orchestra Project will release a disc of Jeremyʼs three recent concertos on its BMOP/sound label: Before the Wresting Tides (2012) featuring pianist Ching-Yun Hu, Serenada Concertante (2013) featuring oboist Erin Hannigan, and Notturno Concertante (2014) featuring clarinetist Chris Grymes, all conducted by Gil Rose.
In 2015, the Grammy-winning Parker Quartet released Jeremyʼs hour-long Capriccio on the Innova Recordings label. This recording garnered extensive critical acclaim: Classical Minnesota Public Radio called it “a work to return to often, for fresh insight and stimulation,” while the San Francisco Chronicle called it “a varied and kaleidoscopic collection of vivid miniatures…an ebullient cataloging of the various textural and rhetorical forms that writing for string quartet can take.” In Capriccio, “Jeremy Gill conveys to us his own special sensibilities as a composer of almost unlimited breadth, a master stylist who knows virtually no boundaries in his poetic collocation of past, present and future,” remarked Gapplegate Classical-Modern Music Review. The Big City Blog included Capriccio on its list of top ten “Best Classical Recordings of 2015,” and Jazz da Gama called it simply “one of the most remarkable opuses in chamber music this year.”
Deemed “a fine pianist” by the New York Times, Jeremy regularly appears as a pianist and conductor in music of his own and by his contemporaries. He has been a featured performer at major venues including Merkin Hall, National Sawdust, the Mansion at Strathmore, and Calderwood Hall at the Gardner Museum. Jeremy has conducted over 35 world premieres featuring artists such as Eric Owens, Ching-Yun Hu, Evan Hughes, Lucy Shelton, and Randall Scarlata with ensembles including the Dolce Suono Ensemble, the Mendelssohn Club of Philadelphia, and Network for New Music. During the 2016–17 season he conducted the Boston-area premiere of Missy Mazzoliʼs Song from the Uproar, featuring the Firebird Ensemble and mezzo-soprano Abigail Fischer, and a concert of Nico Muhlyʼs recent works featuring countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo, both at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum under the auspices of Beth Morrison Projects.
He has received awards and grants from BMI, ASCAP, and a Music Alive composer residency from the League of American Orchestras and Meet the Composer, and has served as the Composer in Residence with Chautauqua Opera, the Harrisburg Symphony Orchestra, and the Newburyport Chamber Music Festival. He is a regular lecturer for the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Rockport Music, and edited A Dance of Polar Opposites, a theoretical-philosophical work written between 1955–2005 by his former teacher George Rochberg, published by the University of Rochester Press in 2012.