Discipline: Music Composition

Aaron Kernis

Discipline: Music Composition
Region: New York, NY
MacDowell Fellowships: 1989, 1991, 1992

Aaron Jay Kernis is a Pulitzer Prize and Grammy-winning composer currently serving as a member of the Yale School of Music faculty. He was born in Philadelphia and began his music career playing violin and piano, beginning composition at age 13. He studied at San Francisco Conservatory, Manhattan School of Music, and Yale University. Kernis spent 15 years as music advisor to the Minnesota Orchestra and as Director of Minnesota Orchestra’s Composers’ Institute. He is currently the Workshop Director of the Nashville Symphony Composer Lab and has received numerous accolades throughout his 35-year career, including honors from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation as well as commissions from the New York Philharmonic, the San Francisco Symphony, and more. He was inducted in the American Classical Music Hall of Fame in 2013. Kernis currently lives in New York with his wife, pianist Evelyne Luest, and their two children.

Studios

New Jersey

Aaron Kernis worked in the New Jersey studio.

The yellow clapboard New Jersey Studio, located on a grassy, sloping site, was funded by the New Jersey Federation of Women’s Clubs and built as an exact replica of Monday Music Studio (1913). The studio’s porch rests on fieldstone piers that increase in height as the ground slopes to the west. Like Monday Music Studio, New Jersey…

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