In 1983, the New York Philharmonic premiered a work entitled Dream of the Morning Sky that came from the pen of a 23-year-old composer named Aaron Jay Kernis. It would result in his national acclaim, and his star would only grow. He has won honors from ASCAP, BMI, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts and the American Academy in Rome; eventually he went on to be the youngest composer ever to receive a Pulitzer Prize—awarded for his String Quartet No. 2 (“musica instrumentalis”) in 1998. He won the prestigious Grawemeyer Award in Music Composition in 2002 for his work Colored Field, making him the youngest composer to win that prize as well. He would also go on to be commissioned by Disney to ring in the new millennium with his choral symphony Garden of Light.

The list of people who have commissioned and performed Kernis’s work runs a veritable who’s who of the classical music world, and his list of honors and awards make him among the most feted composers. He is one of America’s leading lights, having passed from youthful phenomenon to a genuine potent and original artist, possessed of an accessible yet sophisticated voice. “With each new work and new recording,” says the San Francisco Chronicle, “Kernis solidifies his position as the most important traditional-minded composer of his generation. Others may be exploring musical frontiers more restlessly, but no one else is writing music quite this vivid or powerfully direct.”

Born in Philadelphia in 1960, Kernis, largely self taught on violin, piano, and composition, attended the San Francisco Conservatory, the Manhattan School of Music, and Yale University, working along the way with a diverse array of teachers: John Adams, Charles Wuorinen, Morton Subotnick, Bernard Rands and Jacob Druckman. His West to East coast trajectory is betrayed in the wild catholic range of his influences — everything from Gertrude Stein to hard-edged rap to the diaphanous musical canvas of Claude Debussy. Coming up when he did, in the 1980s and 90s, he took from what was around him—the disparate musics and the collapsing aesthetic streams—and, gathering influence from his broad swathe of teachers, forged a rich, distinctive, emotionally immediate music, neither “this” nor “that” but simply and clearly good. The brilliance of his work rests on the exuberant splay of his instrumental palette (even when writing solo or chamber music) crossed with a brooding, poetic depth cut in sharp relief: wild, visceral, violent passages against calm, prayer-like quietude. “Kernis,” Michael Fleming wrote in the St. Paul Pioneer Press, wrote, “is a composer of fastidious technique and wide-ranging imagination.”

Kernis currently serves as composer in residence for the Minnesota Orchestra Composer Institute. Each season, in partnership with the American Music Center, eight or so composers are given the chance to hear their music performed by a professional orchestra after a week-long immersion under the trained and experienced eye of the composer.