Bio

The music of American composer, conductor, and pianist Jeremy Gill is celebrated for its emotional breadth and diversity of expression. His vocal music ranges from “vibrant settings of verses by Blaise Pascal” (Gramophone) for vocal sextet through song settings of texts by Italo Calvino, Anne Carson, Ann Patchett, and Georg Trakl to “vividly colored” (The New York Times) dramatic reworkings of Ancient Greek texts through modern authors like Don Nigro and Michael Zand. His orchestral music is “replete with imaginative textures” (The Dallas Morning News) and includes concertos, tone poems, and symphonies. His chamber music possesses, at times, a “trance-like intensity” (The Boston Musical Intelligencer); it is “fresh and clever,” and “a compositional tour-de-force” (American Record Guide) that reveals “a rapidly shifting exploration of past, present, and future” (I Care If You Listen).

In recent seasons, Jeremy has collaborated with conductors JoAnn Falletta, Stuart Malina, Steven Osgood, Gil Rose, and Jaap van Zweden; pianists Ching-Yun Hu, Beth Levin, Orion Weiss, and Shai Wosner; the vocal sextet Variant 6, and the Grammy-winning Parker Quartet. Recent commissions have come from Boston Modern Orchestra Project, the Dallas Symphony, the Harrisburg Symphony, and New York Classical Players. Jeremy has received major awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, ASCAP, BMI, and the League of American Orchestras, and has enjoyed artist residencies at Bogliasco, Chautauqua Opera, Copland House, and the MacDowell Colony.

During the 2022–23 season, Jeremy will be living and working in Edinburgh, Tel Aviv, Genoa, and Zürich, composing a cycle of tone poems commissioned by Boston Modern Orchestra Project on tales from The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien. This cycle continues from Ainulindalë, commissioned and premiered by the Harrisburg Symphony in 2018. The current season also features the world premieres of Tout le monde à la fois, an Eastman Centennial piece for massed oboes, oboes dʼamour, English horns, bassoons, and contrabassoons, commissioned by Richard Killmer, and a new arrangement of Corvus Mythicus commissioned by the New York Classical Players.

Notable recent premieres include the original Corvus Mythicus (2021), commissioned by the Dallas Symphony Orchestra to celebrate the installation of Dutch artist Arie Van Selmʼs Crow sculpture at the Meyerson Symphony Center in Dallas; the New York Classical Players and the Parker Quartet in Motherwhere: Bagatelles for Strings, after Bán (2021), an NYCP-commissioned concerto for string quartet and string orchestra; Concerto dʼavorio (2019) by pianists Orion Weiss and Shai Wosner with the Chautauqua Symphony under JoAnn Falletta; and The Journey (2019) by Cypriot soprano Marianna Suri, South African bass-baritone Chuma Sijeqa, and the Citizens of the World Choir under Jeremyʼs direction at the Illuminate Rotherhithe migration festival in London. The Journey was recently selected to close Tête à Tête: The Opera Festival 2022, also in London, featuring the same cast.

Recordings of Jeremyʼs music are available from Albany Records, BMOP/sound, Czech Radio, Open G Records, and Innova Recordings. These have garnered extensive praise, both nationally and internationally. 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 U.S. venues including Calderwood Hall (Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum), the Kennedy Center, Merkin Hall, National Sawdust, the Mansion at Strathmore, and internationally at the Museo dʼArte Orientale in Genoa, Italy; Old Town Hall in Brno, Czech Republic, the Cockpit Theatre in London, UK; and Elvermose and Mantziussalen in Denmark.

Jeremy has conducted many world premieres with the Dolce Suono Ensemble, the Mendelssohn Club of Philadelphia, Network for New Music, and the Tactus Ensemble of Manhattan School of Music, among others. In recent seasons he has served as an assistant conductor for Juilliard Opera (2018), and guest conductor for the Tactus Ensemble (2018–22). During the 2019–20 season he conducted the chamber and main stage operas for NYU Steinhardtʼs Vocal Performance program.

Born in Harrisburg, PA in 1975, Jeremy studied oboe, piano, and composition before entering the Eastman School of Music. He received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 2000, and studied internationally at the American Conservatory in Fontainebleau (1993) and the Czech-American Summer Music Institute (1999). His principal teachers include Samuel Adler, George Crumb, Robert Lau, Yinam Leef, David Liptak, James Primosch, Jay Reise, George Rochberg, Christopher Rouse, Joseph Schwantner, and Anna Weesner. He has served as the Composer in Residence with Chautauqua Opera, the Harrisburg Symphony Orchestra, and the Newburyport Chamber Music Festival. He edited A Dance of Polar Opposites, a theoretical-philosophical work written between 1955–2005 by George Rochberg, published by the University of Rochester Press in 2012.