Jenny Beck is a composer of chamber, orchestral, electronic, vocal, and found-sound music, as well as music for dance. She grew up in rural Pennsylvania where the sounds of the woods stirred her imagination at a young age and has gone on to write music that invites listeners into alternative modes of listening, awareness, and consciousness. Working in an intensely distilled musical language, the goal of which is to forge significance for each sound, her music reflects her interests in nature, meditation, ambience, and ambiguity.
Jenny is a finalist for the 2020 Gaudeamus Prize and has been selected for the 2020 RBC BRIDGES Soundstreams’ Workshop for Early Career Composers. She has participated in workshops, festivals, and residencies including the Woodstock Guild Byrdcliffe Artist in Residence program, the Florida State University Festival of New Music, the Bowdoin International Music Festival as the Kaplan Fellow in composition, the UC Davis Composition Workshop, the Copland House CULTIVATE Institute with Derek Bermel, the Norfolk New Music Workshop, Atlantic Center for the Arts Residency with Martin Bresnick, June In Buffalo, the Wellesley Composers Conference, the Tanglewood Music Center, and the Weill Music Institute Professional Training Workshop at Carnegie Hall with Kaija Saariaho.
Jenny has worked with a wide range of chamber ensembles and orchestras including Alarm Will Sound, Latitude 49, Metropolis Ensemble, Modern Medieval, Eighth Blackbird, Argus Quartet, the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, Ensemble Mise En, the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra, Bearthoven, and SōPercussion. She also performs her own vocal work, is a member ofthe Princeton Laptop Orchestra (PLOrk), and leads workshops in creative sonic meditation.
