JACK
HERSCOWITZ
Recent performance by
the Arditti Quartet at June in Buffalo
biography
Jack Herscowitz is a Los Angeles based composer who engages deep inter-personal collaborations, trans-disciplinary thinking, and alternate definitions of "score" to recognize music as a process which has always extended beyond the singular dimension of sound.
His music has been performed throughout the United States and Europe by artists including the Arditti Quartet, Del Sol String Quartet, Ensemble Dal Niente, Meitar Ensemble, Hypercube, and .abeceda Ensemble. He has been a fellow or featured composer at June in Buffalo, Meitar Ensemble's CEME Festival, Arts Letters and Numbers, DePaul University's Residency for New Music, the Provincetown Film Festival, and the University of North Georgia’s ROCC Conference, with performances at the Hellerau European Centre for the Arts, Riverside Church in NYC, the Moscow Conservatory, the Santa Maria del Carmine, Pavia, and the City of Basel Music Academy.
He has collaborated with Pete Francis (formerly of Dispatch) to arrange one of Francis’s original songs, "Show Me", for rock band and orchestra, novelist and poet Julia Alvarez on a piece for chamber orchestra and chamber choir based off her novel, In the Time of Butterflies, and members of the Middlebury College Dance Department. Future collaborations include a new piece for the Atlantic Reed Consort drawing from the ethos of hardcore punk and pop music and the 2022 Shastra Collaborative in Los Angeles to premiere a new arrangement of a traditional Hindustani bhajan for string quartet and Hindustani vocalist. Jack has also written music for big bands and short films, and performs as a saxophonist enamored with improvisation, especially alongside dancers.
Jack’s artistic philosophy is also deeply influenced by his studies in ethnomusicology under professor Damascus Kafumbe. He worked as Kafumbe’s research assistant on the book, Tuning the Kingdom, which was published spring 2018 and won the 2020 Kwabena Nketia Book Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology. Jack's personal research on the legacy of La Nueva Canción Chilena won the 2021 Lise Waxer NECSEM Prize and other research projects have studied the embodied practice of Pauline Oliveros’ Sonic Meditations as well as syncretic musical influences in Keith Jarrett's improvisations.
Jack is pursuing an M.F.A. in Composition and Experimental Sound Practices at CalArts and holds a B.A. in Music and Environmental Studies from Middlebury College. His current and previous mentors include Michael Pisaro, Steve Lehman, and Matthew Evan Taylor.