John Aylward

Grateful to be awarded the Walter Hinrichsen Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. An incredible honor to be counted among so many brilliant composers. I’m humbled and hope to make the award count toward more good music making ahead. I’ll send along pictures from the Academy Ceremony soon!

Last month I was a guest composer at the Takefu International Music Festival where I was teaching and coaching some performances of some new pieces. It was an honor to work alongside Toshio Hosokawa, the festival’s director, other guest teachers Isabel Mundry and Hitomi Kaneko, and a group of some very talented students.

River at Takefu

Rehearsing Daedalus

Group Lessons

Takefu Festival Hall Plaza

Masterclasses at Takefu

Plaza outside the Festival Hall

New Horizon’s Concert Series

With Toshio Hosokawa and Noriko Miura

With Isabel Mundry and Hitomi Kaneko

Group Lessons

With Mario, Dylan and Yohanan

With Yohanan Chendler

Festival Dinner

Takefu at Night

Takefu at Night

Tokyo from Above

Sunset over Takefu

Come check out Boston Musica Viva performing Ephemera on September 23rd and / or Mark Berger and Don Berman performing Images of Departure at Brandeis University on October 7th.

When I’m back from Japan, I’ll post more upcoming performances!

Thanks to all who helped out on such an amazing premiere of Angelus Novus last week at Le Laboratoire. It was an incredible experience to work with many friends and collaborators on a piece that’s become very personal and important, both through the writing and through the collaborations and relationships it sparked. I hope if you find your way here, you’ll give the piece a listen / look.

The project was made very special by Roberta Michel, flutes; Hassan Anderson, oboe; Jennifer Choi, violin; Carlos Cordiero, clarinets; John Popham, cello; and Sam Budish, percussion. Also four special friends: Jean-Philippe Wurtz, conductor; Colin Gee, choreography and dance; Alex Posen, costumes; and Steven Taylor and Sam Okerstrom-Lang, visual / animation designers.

I’m speechless after receiving a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation. This is once-in-a-lifetime support and I hope to use the time wisely for upcoming projects — the first being an ongoing commission from the Fromm Foundation, which I hope to premiere in the spring of 2018 (more on that soon!) and the second being a new ballet, Angelus Novus.

I’ll workshop part of Angelus Novus this May 19th at Le Laboratoire, Cambridge. For more on that, you can check out the event page.

I’m grateful to receive this honor and am thankful to all who have been supportive.

Honored to be one of this year’s Fromm Music Foundation commissioned composers. In with some great company of very talented individuals and happy to considered among them. I’ll be using the grant to write a piece that culminates my recent body of work based on Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

From The Etchings Festival.

“… as a breath of wind or some echo rebounds from smooth surfaces and returns to the source from which it issued, so the stream of beauty passes back into its possessor through his eyes, its natural route to the soul; arriving there and setting him aflutter, it waters the passages of the feathers and causes the wings to grow, and fills the soul of the loved one in his turn with love.”

— Plato. Phaedrus.

A quick dispatch from MacDowell where I’m deep in autumn, nested in the woods and finishing Switch.

A brief post to share this latest premiere–just performed by Sound Energy. What a group! Last fall, they premiered Arachne–has been a great experience working with them!