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Jennifer Higdon

Jennifer Higdon Biography

Composer

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“When anyone is creating anything, it has no choice but to be in that stream. The art I create and the art my colleagues create is part of it. But the question is: how long will it last in the stream? I think of it really as an enormous river, with its shores very distant from each other, and only time will tell what's going to last in the end. It seems to me that all music of our time is connected, but I never think about where I am in the river or how I would be placed by others inside of it.”

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“In fact, if you take any group of scores, it's likely that fifty to sixty percent are going to be so much alike that it's difficult to tell any difference among them. But I sometimes wonder if that has more to do with the quality of the art that's being made. There are always those composers who are going to move toward whatever is currently in fashion, there are others who will deliberately attempt to go in another direction. And sometimes, there are composers who will see themselves as being outside the stream and not even try to present their music to the general public.”

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“My pieces usually are programmed on concerts in which the other works are standard repertoire. My music always sounds very different when it's on a concert of all contemporary music. It always seems to stick out at an odd angle. This also makes me think of a question I sometimes debate with my friends: does the music of a composer directly reflect that composer's personality? This is a difficult one, but I think it usually does.”

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“I know that my music is heard a lot in commercial circles. In academia, I think my music is taken in differently but I'm not sure why that is. Some kind of sixth sense tells me that people in that world are thinking differently about it. I don't know if it has to do with the structure of my music, which is probably more apparent to those in the academic world than it is in the commercial world, where people tend not to think of that aspect of music so much. They just listen for pure enjoyment.”

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