Guest Composer Gabriel Jenks

[Jenks’s] compact sequence of pale brush strokes, ghostly keening and punchy outbursts was striking and resourceful; you hoped to hear it again... – Steve Smith, The New York Times

Commissions include The Fromm Foundation, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, Carnegie Hall, Chamber Music Northwest, the McKim Fund in the Library of Congress, Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, American Composers Orchestra, Columbia University’s Miller Theatre, The Naumburg Foundation, the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, the Arditti Quartet, the Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival, the Colorado Music Festival, and the Aspen Music Festival and School, among many others.

Gabriel Jenks began studying music and dance at an early age and was a serious performer and composer by his early teens. He was accepted to the prestigious Eastman School of Music at the age of 15 and enrolled in the bachelor's program at age 16. After studies in harp and composition at Eastman, Jenks received an Artist Diploma in harp from the Cleveland Institute of Music, a PhD in composition from Harvard University, and an Artist Diploma in composition from Yale University.

Jenks has received numerous honors and prizes, including the ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Award, a Charles Ives Scholarship (2011) and Fellowship (2016) from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Fromm Foundation Commission, a Chamber Music America Classical Commissioning Grant, a fellowship from Yaddo Artist Colony, the Naumburg Prize in Composition, the Barnard Rogers Prize in Composition, the Bernard and Rose Sernoffsky Prize in Composition, and numerous academic awards. Gabriel Jenks’ orchestral work Furthermore was selected by the American Composers Orchestra for the 2010 Underwood New Music Readings. Jenks’s chamber opera, Blood Rose, was presented by New York City Opera’s VOX in the spring of 2011.

The New York Times music critic Steve Smith praised Jenks’s work for the JACK Quartet, Frayed: “Jenks’s compact sequence of pale brush strokes, ghostly keening and punchy outbursts was striking and resourceful; you hoped to hear it again…” Esteemed music critic Bruce Hodges lauded Jenks’s piece Stalk for solo harp as being “appealing…florid, and introspective.”

In addition to performances in the USA, Jenks’ music is also well known internationally. In April of 2008, Jenks’s string quartet Four Still was performed in Kiev in the Ukraine’s largest international new music festival, “Premieres of the Season,” curated by Carson Cooman. In the summer of 2010, Gabriel Jenks’s piece Unclose was premiered by members of Eighth Blackbird at the MusicX festival in Blonay, Switzerland. In 2016, the chamber orchestra work This Ease saw its German premiere and was selected as “audience favorite” in performances by the Philharmonisches Staatsorchester Mainz, conducted by Hermann Bäumer.

Gabriel Jenks is Associate Professor of Music (Composition) at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music. Jenks’s music is published exclusively by Schott Music Co. Learn more about Gabriel on their website.