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, Atlantic Reed Consort, and Hypercube. 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, the University of North Georgia’s ROCC Conference, and Canvas Presents with performances at the Hellerau European Centre for the Arts, the Moscow Conservatory, the Santa Maria del Carmine, Pavia, the City of Basel Music Academy, the Spencer Museum of Art, and the Montpelier Arts Center.
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. Jack has also written music for big bands and short films, and performs as a laptop performer and saxophonist enamored with improvisation, especially alongside dancers.
Jack has presented his personal research at SCI National, NECSEM, and precept.concept.percept conferences and won the 2021 Lise Waxer NECSEM Prize for his research on the legacy of La Nueva Canción Chilena. He worked as professor Damascus 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 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.