Jennifer Higdon

• 1. Introduction

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  Jennifer Higdon picked up a flute her mother had bought and began teaching herself to play from an old flute method book. She had no theory training, no keyboard skills, and could not spell a chord. By her own account, she started from "the very, very beginning." Yet Jennifer Elaine Higdon, born on the 31st of December 1962 in Brooklyn, New York, would go on to win the Pulitzer Prize, three Grammy Awards, and commissions from some of the most storied orchestras in the United States.

  Her path raises an obvious question: how does someone with almost no classical music in their upbringing end up writing concertos performed by the world's leading soloists? The answer is rooted in rock and folk, in the mountains of Tennessee, in an unusual teacher, and in a single tone poem written for a brother who died too young.

• 2. An Unlikely Beginning

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  Charles Higdon, her father, was a painter who took his children to exhibitions of new and experimental art, shaping Jennifer's early sense of what art could be. The family left Brooklyn and spent her first decade in Atlanta, Georgia, before moving to Seymour, Tennessee, where the mountains and open spaces would later find their way into her music.

  Classical music was absent from the household. Instead, she grew up listening to rock and folk from the 1960s: the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Simon and Garfunkel. It was not until high school that she joined a concert band and began playing percussion, then turned to a secondhand flute and a method book. She played flute in the concert band and percussion in the marching band, and she heard almost no classical music before college.

  At Bowling Green State University, she studied flute performance with Judith Bentley, who encouraged her to explore composition. Higdon later described her arrival in college with disarming candor: she did not know basic theory, could not spell a chord, did not know what intervals were, and had zero keyboard skills. Bentley's encouragement, combined with Higdon's own stubbornness, pushed her forward even when some professors offered discouragement rather than support.

• 3. The Education That Shaped Her Voice

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  At Bowling Green, Higdon wrote Night Creatures, a two-minute piece for flute and piano, her first composition. She also played in the university orchestra, where she noticed something about her own tastes: because she had come to classical music so differently from most of her peers, the newer repertoire appealed to her more than the older canon.

  It was also at Bowling Green that she met Robert Spano, who was teaching a conducting course there. Spano would become one of the champions of her music within the American orchestral community.

  From Bowling Green she went to the Curtis Institute of Music, where she studied with David Loeb and, while there, taught a student who would become the celebrated violinist Hilary Hahn. She then moved to the University of Pennsylvania, earning both a master of arts and a PhD in composition under George Crumb. Crumb reinforced something the Tennessee landscape had already planted in her: he encouraged her to use nature as a muse. That connection bound the two composers together and gave shape to an instinct she had carried since childhood.

• 4. blue cathedral and What It Cost

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  Her brother died of cancer in 1998, and Higdon responded the way she knew how. She wrote blue cathedral, a single-movement tone poem in his memory. It premiered in 2000, and in the years that followed, more than 400 orchestras around the world performed it, making it her most-heard work.

  Not every critic was moved. Rowena Smith of The Guardian described it as "pure new-age fluff; undemanding, unadventurous tonality dressed up as a quasi-mystical experience by the addition of bells and chimes." The charge did not slow the piece's spread through the orchestral world.

  The durability of blue cathedral sits at the center of the debate about Higdon's music. Her neoromantic harmonic language, with its open perfect fifths and its avoidance of fixed key signatures, produces sudden shifts that can read as emotionally direct to one listener and structurally vacant to another. Raymond Tuttle acknowledged that the Concerto for Orchestra was not remarkable for its melodic content, but argued that the color and brilliance of her writing carried listeners past that gap.

• 5. The Pulitzer and the Grammy Years

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  The Violin Concerto premiered on the 6th of February 2009 in Indianapolis, commissioned jointly by the Indianapolis Symphony, the Toronto Symphony, the Baltimore Symphony, and the Curtis Institute of Music. The Pulitzer Prize citation the following year called it "a deeply engaging piece that combines flowing lyricism with dazzling virtuosity." Higdon was awarded the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Music.

  Also in 2010, her Percussion Concerto won the Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Classical Composition, the first of three such awards. The Viola Concerto brought the second Grammy in 2018. That concerto appeared on an album called Higdon: All Things Majestic, Viola Concerto, and Oboe Concerto, released on the Naxos label, which also won the 2018 Grammy for Best Classical Compendium. In 2020, her Harp Concerto took the third Grammy in the same category.

  Her list of commissioners reads like a map of American orchestral life: the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Chicago Symphony, the Atlanta Symphony, the National Symphony, the Minnesota Orchestra, the Pittsburgh Symphony, the Indianapolis Symphony, and the Dallas Symphony all brought her work into being. Conductors including Christoph Eschenbach, Marin Alsop, Leonard Slatkin, and Giancarlo Guerrero worked with her extensively.

• 6. Cold Mountain and the Operatic Turn

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  Charles Frazier published Cold Mountain in 1997, and Higdon eventually turned it into her first opera. The libretto came from Gene Scheer, and the production was co-commissioned by The Santa Fe Opera and Opera Philadelphia. It premiered in Santa Fe in 2015.

  The world premiere recording was released in 2016 on the PENTATONE label, featuring Miguel Harth-Bedoya conducting a cast that included Nathan Gunn, Isabel Leonard, Jay Hunter Morris, Emily Fons, and Robert Pomakov.

  The opera represented a particular challenge within Higdon's working method. In her vocal and choral writing, she aims to mirror speech patterns, applying them to both pitch and rhythm. She works to reflect the mood of the text so that melodies lean toward a romantic sound. When setting non-English texts, she tends to use both the original language and a translation within the piece, so that the music can communicate its meaning to as wide an audience as possible.

• 7. A Style Built From the Outside In

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  Higdon has described her compositional process as "intuitive" and "instinctive," favoring music that makes sense rather than music that conforms to classical forms. Her music is sectional but avoids rigid structures; melodies often carry across bar lines, creating what she calls motivic and sectional ambiguity.

  Many of her works begin with sparse orchestration and build in performing forces as the piece progresses. She does not start with a form in mind. She lets the music unfold. Her early percussion background fed a rhythmic density that runs through even her most lyrical passages. Complex rhythmic passages sit alongside singing melodic lines, and rhythmic ostinati give motion to her faster works. Some of that repetition sits close to minimalism.

  Harmonically, open perfect fifths dominate. Traditional harmonic progressions give way to more open intervals, which allow for sudden shifts and modulations that are one of the signatures of her sound. The League of American Orchestras named her one of the most performed living American composers in 2008. By that point, her works had been recorded on more than four dozen CDs. She held the Milton L. Rock Chair in Compositional Studies at the Curtis Institute of Music from 1994 to 2021, retiring from teaching to live in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.