Bio

Recent collaborators of American composer, conductor, and pianist Jeremy Gill include conductors JoAnn Falletta, Stuart Malina, Steven Osgood, Gil Rose, and Jaap van Zweden; pianists Ching-Yun Hu, Orion Weiss, and Shai Wosner; the vocal sextet Variant 6, and the Grammy-winning Parker Quartet. Jeremy has written major works for flutist Mimi Stillman, oboist Erin Hannigan, clarinetist Chris Grymes, and pianist Peter Orth, and the Buffalo Philharmonic, Chautauqua Symphony, Dallas Symphony, and Harrisburg Symphony have each commissioned his compositions since 2015. Other commissions have come from American Opera Projects, Chamber Music America, Concert Artists Guild, the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts, and the American Composers Forum. Jeremy has received major awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, ASCAP, BMI, and the League of American Orchestras.

During the 2019–20 season, pianists Orion Weiss and Shai Wosner premiered Concerto dʼavorio (2019), a four-movement concerto for four-hands piano, with the Chautauqua Symphony under conductor JoAnn Falletta. Cypriot soprano Marianna Suri, South African bass-baritone Chuma Sijeqa, and the Citizens of the World Choir premiered The Journey (2019), a theatre piece setting a text by Iranian-born British author Michael Zand, under Jeremyʼs direction at the Illuminate Rotherhithe migration festival in London, UK. Clarinetist Chris Grymes and Jeremy gave the DC premiere of …and everywhere the sea (2017) during The REACH Opening Festival at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. And in April 2019, National Sawdust presented a portrait concert of Jeremyʼs music, including the world premiere of Lascia fare mi (2018) and the NYC premieres of Duo for Violin and Piano (2015), and Whitman Portrait (2014). The virtuoso vocal sextet Variant 6 rounded out the program with a second NYC performance of Six Pensées de Pascal (2017), which will be released commercially on the Open G Records label in 2021. The concert, featured in the New Yorker and its criticʼs pick of the week, was performed to a capacity crowd.

Despite the many challenges confronting arts organizations world-wide, several premieres are scheduled for the 2020–21 season, including a Quartet for Oboe and Strings featuring Erin Hannigan and the Dallas Symphony Chamber Players on the Dallas Chamber Music Society series, Cantilena, a quintet for oboe, trumpet, viola, double bass, and piano based on a theme by Robert Lau to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Foundation for Enhancing Communities in Jeremyʼs native Harrisburg, and Valse Variée pour N.B., commemorating the 100th anniversary of the American Conservatory in Fontainebleau, where Jeremy studied. Finally, the Lowell Chamber Orchestra will present the long-overdue premiere of Jeremyʼs 2003 Dirge-Fantasy (after Bartók) under the direction of Music Director Orlando Cela.

Recent seasons saw premieres of Ainulindalë, a tone poem for large orchestra based on J. R. R. Tolkienʼs posthumous The Silmarillion by the Harrisburg Symphony Orchestra (2018), Ladiesʼ Voices, a setting of Gertrude Steinʼs play of the same name, by coloratura Chelsea Miller and the Chautauqua Symphony Orchestra (2016), and an oboe concerto, Serenada Concertante, by the Dallas Symphony Orchestra featuring principal oboist Erin Hannigan (2016). Jeremyʼs chamber opera Letters from Quebec to Providence in the Rain, based on a play by Don Nigro, was premiered by Lyric Theatre @ Illinois and the Illinois Modern Ensemble under Jeremyʼs direction in 2016; it was a finalist for the 2017 Dominick Argento Chamber Opera Prize and was later produced by UC Santa Barbara and the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa (2017).

Described as “vividly colored” (The New York Times), “replete with imaginative textures” (The Dallas Morning News), and “exhilarating” (The Philadelphia Inquirer), Jeremyʼs 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 (2017, 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. The trip was documented in the film Heard in Havana by Zac Nicholson, and a CD album of the same name featuring Third Sound, released by Innova Recordings in 2020.

In 2017, Gil Rose and Boston Modern Orchestra Project released the first recording of Jeremyʼs orchestral music, including Before the Wresting Tides (2012), Serenada Concertante (2013), and Notturno Concertante (2014), featuring Rubinstein-prize winning pianist Ching-Yun Hu with the Marsh Chapel Choir, oboist Erin Hannigan, and clarinetist Chris Grymes. Gramophone Magazine called this “a very warmly recommendable disc,” to which HRAudio added, “Jeremy Gill shines with three unique concertos in this latest release…and dissolves limitations of time, space, and consciousness in seductive, dreamlike flights of fancy,” while New Music Buff raved, “the composer’s ability to utilize such a large orchestra yet still produce lucid textures is a mark of genius.”

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 Calderwood Hall at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the Kennedy Center, Merkin Hall, National Sawdust, the Mansion at Strathmore, and internationally at the Museo dʼArte Orientale in Genova, Italy and Old Town Hall in Brno, Czech Republic. 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, Network for New Music, and the Tactus Ensemble of Manhattan School of 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 under the auspices of Beth Morrison Projects. During the 2018–19 season he served as assistant conductor for Juilliard Operaʼs Turn of the Screw, and guest conductor for Manhattan School of Musicʼs Tactus Ensemble. During the 2019–20 season he conducted the chamber and main stage operas for NYU Steinhardtʼs Vocal Performance program, and returned to conduct MSMʼs Tactus Ensemble in major works by David Del Tredici and Reiko Füting, with both composers present.

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.