Jennifer Higdon BiographyJennifer Higdon (b.1962) started late in music, teaching herself to play the flute at the age of fifteen and then beginning formal musical studies at eighteen, with an even later start in composition at the age of 21. Despite this late start, she has become a major figure in contemporary classical music and is able to make her living from commissions and on average completes between five and ten pieces a year. These works run the range of genres from orchestral to chamber, and from choral to vocal. She is the recipient of many awards, including a Pew Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship and two awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In the summer of 2003 she was the first woman to be a featured composer at the Tanglewood Contemporary Music Festival.
The 2005 Van Cliburn Competition also featured her work, Secret and Glass Gardens as part of its semi-final rounds. Her commissions have included works for such major groups as the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Atlanta Symphony, the Dallas Symphony, the Indianapolis Symphony, National Symphony, the Pittsburgh Symphony, and the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra; for the new music ensemble, eighth blackbird, the Tokyo String Quartet, the Ying Quartet, and the Lark Quartet; and for such soloists as Colin Currie, Gary Graffman and Lang Lang. Jennifer Higdon’s works enjoy more than one hundred performances annually. Her orchestral work, blue cathedral, has become one of the most performed contemporary orchestral works in the United States. Her music appeals to a wide-ranging audience in both classical experience and age. Matt Groening, creator of the popular The Simpsons series, singled out her disc, the Grammy-award winning Higdon: Concerto for Orchestra/City Scape, as one of his top-ten favorites of 2004. She is on the composition faculty at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia.
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