The music of American composer, conductor, and pianist Jeremy Gill is celebrated for its emotional breadth and diversity of expression. His vocal music ranges from “vibrant settings” (Gramophone) of texts by Blaise Pascal for vocal sextet through song settings of texts by Italo Calvino, Anne Carson, Ann Patchett, and Georg Trakl to “vividly colored” (The New York Times) dramatic reworkings of Ancient Greek texts and modern authors like Don Nigro and Michael Zand. His orchestral music is “replete with imaginative textures” (The Dallas Morning News) and includes concertos, tone poems, and symphonies. His chamber music possesses, at times, a “trance-like intensity” (The Boston Musical Intelligencer); it is “fresh and clever,” and “a compositional tour-de-force” (American Record Guide) that reveals “a rapidly shifting exploration of past, present, and future” (I Care If You Listen).
Jeremyʼs music has been commissioned by American Opera Projects, Boston Modern Orchestra Project, Chautauqua Opera Company, the Dallas Symphony, the Eastman School of Music, the Harrisburg Symphony, and New York Classical Players, among many others. He has received major awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, ASCAP, BMI, Chamber Music America, and the League of American Orchestras, and has enjoyed residencies at Bogliasco, Copland House, the MacDowell Colony, and Willapa Bay.
The 2026–27 season includes the world premieres of Soft as the Massacre of Suns, a concerto for oboe and chamber orchestra commissioned by the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University, featuring oboist Erin Hannigan and conductor Miguel Harth-Bedoya with the Shepherd School Chamber Orchestra, and 11 Fantasties on a Phrygian Chorale for string orchestra, commissioned by New York Classical Players, conducted by Dongmin Kim. During the summer of 2026, Jeremyʼs newest chamber opera Ida by Lamplight will be premiered at the historic Chautauqua Amphitheater, conducted by Steven Osgood and directed by Ned Canty. Ida by Lamplight sets a libretto by Jerre Dye, and was commissioned by Chautauqua Opera Company—with generous support from the New York State Council on the Arts—to celebrate the 150th anniversary of The Chautauquan Daily.
Notable recent premieres include Epiphanies (2024), a set of five orchestral songs premiered by Robin Johannsen and the Harrisburg Symphony; Tout le monde à la fois (2022), an Eastman Centennial work for massed oboes, oboes dʼamour, English horns, bassoons, and contrabassoons, commissioned by Richard Killmer and premiered by the Eastman Schoolʼs double reeds; Corvus Mythicus (2021), commissioned by the Dallas Symphony Orchestra to celebrate the installation of Dutch artist Arie Van Selmʼs Crow sculpture at the Meyerson Symphony Center in Dallas; Motherwhere: Bagatelles for Strings, after Bán (2021), a concerto for string quartet and string orchestra commissioned by New York Classical Players for the Parker Quartet; and Four Legends from the Silmarillion (2023), an hour-long set of four tone poems commissioned by Boston Modern Orchestra Project. BMOP will release Four Legends on their celebrated BMOP/sound label in 2026, conducted by Artistic Director Gil Rose.
Recent European premieres include Widersprüche (on the Othmar Schoeck Festival in Switzerland, 2024), Anna Dreams of Mazurkas (featuring Anna Kijanowska in Poland, 2024), Helian, (featuring Johannes Held at the Piano Salon Christophori in Berlin, 2023), and The Journey (featuring Marianna Suri, Chuma Sijeqa, and the Citizens of the World Choir, presented by Tête à Tête: The Opera Festival, 2022, in London).
Deemed “a fine pianist” by the New York Times, Jeremy regularly appears as a pianist and conductor in music of his own and by his contemporaries. He has been a featured performer at major U.S. venues including Calderwood Hall (Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum), the Kennedy Center, Merkin Hall, National Sawdust, the Mansion at Strathmore, and internationally at the Museo dʼArte Orientale in Genoa, Italy; Old Town Hall in Brno, Czech Republic; the Cockpit Theatre in London, UK; Piano Salon Christophori in Berlin, Germany; and Elvermose and Mantziussalen in Denmark. Jeremy has conducted many world premieres with the Dolce Suono Ensemble, the Mendelssohn Club of Philadelphia, Network for New Music, the Tactus Ensemble of Manhattan School of Music, and the Washington Square Contemporary Music Society, among others.
Born in Harrisburg, PA in 1975, Jeremy studied oboe, piano, and composition before entering the Eastman School of Music. He received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 2000, and studied internationally at the American Conservatory in Fontainebleau (1993) and the Czech-American Summer Music Institute (1999). His principal teachers include Samuel Adler, George Crumb, Robert Lau, Yinam Leef, David Liptak, James Primosch, Jay Reise, George Rochberg, Christopher Rouse, Joseph Schwantner, and Anna Weesner. He edited A Dance of Polar Opposites, a theoretical- philosophical work written between 1955–2005 by George Rochberg, published by the University of Rochester Press in 2012.
