Described as “mournful” (New York Times), “luminous” (Washington Post), and having “a sound world of its own” (Pioneer Press), the music of composer Shawn Jaeger (b. 1985, Louisville, Kentucky) explores folksong, field recording, and sonic ephemera to explore placemaking and personal and cultural memory.

He’s worked with leading performers, including Dawn Upshaw and the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, JACK Quartet, Talea Ensemble, Ensemble Dal Niente, Ekmeles, Aizuri Quartet, Longleash, Contemporaneous, Alexi Kenney, and Vicky Chow. His music has been featured at venues including Carnegie Hall’s Zankel Hall and Weill Recital Hall, Merkin Concert Hall, the Morgan Library, the Library of Congress, (Le) Poisson Rouge, Roulette, Jordan Hall, and the Ordway Center for the Performing Arts, and on such festivals as Tanglewood, MATA, FERUS, Resonant Bodies, NYFOS Next, and Brooklyn Art Song Society’s New Voices. He has received commissions from Carnegie Hall’s Weill Music Institute, the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, the Bard College Conservatory of Music, the American Composers Forum/Jerome Fund for New Music (JFund), Roulette/Jerome Foundation, the BMI Foundation/Concert Artists Guild (Carlos Surinach Commission), and Chamber Music America. His awards include the Claire Rosen and Samuel Edes Foundation Prize for Emerging Artists, Northwestern University’s M. William Karlins and William T. Faricy Awards, the ASCAP Foundation Morton Gould Young Composer Award, and two BMI Student Composer Awards. His opera, Payne Hollow, received coverage in Modern Farmer and a mention in Gene Logsdon’s Letters to a Young Farmer.

Jaeger holds a DMA from Northwestern University, and a BM from the University of Michigan. He’s taught music at the Bard College Conservatory of Music Preparatory Division, Tufts University, Princeton University (as a 2016-18 Princeton Arts Fellow), Brown University, The New School, and Kaufman Music Center’s Special Music School (PS 859). In 2023, he became Executive Director of Musicambia, a non-profit organization that develops music education programs in prisons to build supportive communities that transform lives inside and outside the criminal legal system. He lives in Brooklyn.

Updated September, 2023

photos: Arthur Moeller