Jason Eckardt

Jason Eckardt
 
    Jason Eckardt (b. 1971, Princeton, NJ) played guitar in rock and jazz bands until, upon hearing the music of Webern, he immediately devoted himself to composition. He has been internationally recognized through commissions from Carnegie Hall, the Koussevitzky Foundation, the Guggenheim Museum, the Fromm Foundation at Harvard University, and percussionist Evelyn Glennie; awards from the ISCM (National Prize), Deutschen Musikrat-Stadt Wesel (Symposium NRW Prize), ASCAP, the University of Illinois (Martirano Prize), and Columbia University (Rapoport Prize); and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation/Bellagio Center, Fondation Royaumont, the MacDowell and Millay Colonies, the National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts, the Fritz Reiner Center, the Composers Conference, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, Meet the Composer, and the Yvar Mikhashoff Trust. Major festivals have programmed his works, including IRCAM-Resonances, ISCM World Music Days, Darmstadt Ferienkurse, Voix Nouvelles, Musik im 20. Jahrhundert, Musica Nova Sofia, Currents in Musical Thought-Seoul, New Consortium, International Review of Contemporary Music, Festival of New American Music, and the International Bartók Festival. Additional recordings of Eckardt’s music may be heard on the New World, Helicon, and Metier labels. Eckardt studied composition and guitar at the Berklee College of Music and later received a doctorate in composition from Columbia University where his principal teachers were Mario Davidovsky and Jonathan Kramer. He has attended masterclasses with Milton Babbitt, James Dillon, Brian Ferneyhough, Jonathan Harvey, and Karlheinz Stockhausen and has taught at Columbia University, the University of Illinois, Rutgers University, and Northwestern University.