Steven Mackey

Steven Mackey is a GRAMMY-winning composer of works for chamber ensemble, orchestra, dance, and opera—commissioned by the greatest orchestras around the world, recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Kennedy Center Friedheim Award, and several awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, of which he is an elected member. Bright in coloring, ecstatic in inventiveness, lively and profound, Mackey’s music spins the tendrils of his improvisatory riffs into large-scale works of grooving, dramatic coherence.

Mackey began composition studies at the University of California at Davis and received his PhD at Brandeis University. Upon graduating and becoming a professor at Princeton, Mackey came to realize his true creative voice by merging his academic training with the free-spirited physicality of his mother-tongue rock guitar music.

Mackey’s music is published by Boosey & Hawkes. Today, he lives in Princeton, New Jersey with his wife, composer Sarah Kirkland Snider, and their son Jasper and daughter Dylan. He served as Professor of Music at Princeton University for 41 years, helping to shape multiple generations of composers and musicians, and joined the composition faculty of the Curtis Institute of Music in fall 2022. He continues to mentor young composers as director of the Edward T. Cone Composition Institute. He continues to explore an ever-widening world of timbres befitting a complex, 21st-century culture, while always striving to make music that unites the head and heart, that is visceral, that gets us moving.