Judah E. Adashi Composer

Said to be "embarked on a promising career" (Washington Post), composer Judah E. Adashi has been honored with awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the ASCAP and BMI Foundations, and the Aspen Music Festival, as well as two artist residencies from the Yaddo Corporation. Recent commissions have come from the Aspen Music Festival, where Mr. Adashi was a visiting artist in 2003 and 2004, and from Arc Duo, which premiered his Songs of Kabir for flute and guitar at Merkin Hall in 2005. In 2006, he was awarded a commission from the BMI Foundation's Carlos Surinach Fund; The Dark Hours, for Concert Artists Guild bassoonist Peter Kolkay, was premiered in 2007. Mr. Adashi directs the composition program at the Peabody Preparatory, and is an adjunct faculty member in the composition, music theory, and humanities departments at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, MD. He is also the founder and director of Baltimore's Evolution Contemporary Music Series, noted for having "added a welcome dose of newness to the local concert scene" (Baltimore Sun). His principal composition teachers have been Nicholas Maw and John Harbison; he holds degrees from Yale University and the Peabody Conservatory of Music of the Johns Hopkins University.

It is a strange business, composing music in 21st-century America. The job is difficult in itself: it is slow, solitary, and intensely cerebral. You have to believe deeply in yourself to get through the process. You have to be possibly a little mad. When you are done, you have in your hands not a finished object - a painting that can be put up on a wall or a novel that can be read at one sitting - but a set of abstract notations that other musicians must learn and perform. Then you step back into the culture at large, where few people embrace, or even notice, what you do. In this country, classical music is widely regarded as a dead or alien form - so much so that jazz aficianados routinely say, 'Jazz is America's classical music.' To make the counterargument that America's classical music is America's classical music is somehow to admit that the battle is lost. Alex Ross, The New Yorker, 1/8/2001

This page was last updated on 2/10/08

Photo by Thomas A. Ault