Steven Mackey Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters
Curtis congratulates renowned composer and faculty member Steven Mackey on being elected to the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Letters. Regarded as one of the leading composers of his generation, the GRAMMY Award-winning artist and influential guitarist was announced as one of 19 new members and four new honorary members to be inducted into the academy during its annual ceremony in May 2024. Founded in 1898, the academy is an honor society composed of the country’s preeminent architects, artists, composers, and writers. In addition to Dr. Mackey, the academy membership includes Curtis alumna and former longtime faculty member Jennifer Higdon (’88), who was elected in 2022. Other Curtis alumni and faculty who were members of the academy include the late Samuel Barber, Leonard Bernstein, Marc Blitzstein, Lukas Foss, Ned Rorem, Randall Thompson, and George Walker, among others.
Bright in coloring, ecstatic in inventiveness, lively and profound, Dr. Mackey’s music spins the tendrils of his improvisatory riffs into large-scale works of grooving, dramatic coherence. As a teenager growing up in Northern California obsessed with blues-rock guitar, Dr. Mackey was in search of the “right wrong notes,” those heart-wrenching moments that imbue the music with new, unexpected momentum. Today, his pieces play with that tension of being inside or outside of the harmony and flow forward, shimmering with prismatic detail.
Signature early works merged his academic training with the free-spirited physicality of his mother-tongue rock guitar music: Troubadour Songs (1991) and Physical Property (1992) for string quartet and electric guitar; and Banana/Dump Truck (1995), an electrified-cello concerto. Later works explored his deepening fascination with transformation and movement of sound through time: Dreamhouse (2003), a rich work for voices and ensemble, was nominated for four GRAMMY awards; A Beautiful Passing (2008) for violin and orchestra on the passing of his mother; and Slide (2011), a GRAMMY Award-winning music theater piece.
Steven Mackey discusses the moment he knew he wanted to become a composer. Click HERE or view the video below.
Dr. Mackey further expanded his theatrical catalog with his short chamber opera Moon Tea about the 1969 meeting between the Apollo 11 astronauts and the Royal Family, premiered by Opera Theatre of Saint Louis in 2021. Other world premieres in 2021 included Shivaree, a trumpet fantasy featuring soloist Thomas Hooten, who premiered the work with the LA Philharmonic and Gustavo Dudamel.
Today, Steven Mackey writes for chamber ensemble, orchestra, dance, and opera—commissioned by the greatest orchestras around the world. He has served as professor of music at Princeton University for the past 35 years and has won several awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Kennedy Center Friedheim Award. 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.
The world premiere of Dr. Mackey’s Aluminum Flowers, for solo electric guitar and orchestra, featuring the virtuosity of guitarist JIJI (’15), will debut on March 9, 2024 at 3:00 p.m. with the Curtis Symphony Orchestra as part of “Ra, Mackey, and Tchaikovsky.”
Learn more about the American Academy of Arts and Letters HERE, and read the official announcement HERE.
Photos of Steven Mackey courtesy of the artist’s official website and Facebook page.
