Aaron Jay Kernis

Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Aaron Jay Kernis studied composition in San Francisco, Manhattan and at Yale with John Adams, Jacob Druckman, Morton Subotnik, and Charles Wuorinen. He employed rigorous compositional processes until the early 1980s when a growing sense of intuitive freedom became increasingly evident in his work. From 1990 his style took on a new transparency and emotional eloquence, as in the exquisite musica celestis. His is a truly eclectic musical language, as willing to incorporate the influences of Latin rhythms, jazz and rap as to use harmonic worlds of the Romantic masters, the Renaissance and Hildegard von Bingen.