Jeffrey Treviño
Composer
Upcoming
- Summer, 2027 — composer in residence at the Arvo Pärt Centre · Estonia
Jeffrey Treviño is a composer and pianist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. His compositions explore how sources beyond music suggest ways of putting sounds together. Varied inspirations — bubbly soda, zoetropes, the ticking of a clock, the mobile sculptures of Alexander Calder, and texts like poems, short science-fiction stories, instruction manuals, and scientific journals — provoke materials and structures that translate found rhythm, spirit, and logic into organized sound: a manual on the design and construction of fences inspires a collage of miniatures for orchestra, with unpredictable interruption by advertisements; a description of empty space between atomic particles becomes a string quartet built from silence and microscopically tiny sounds; and the liquid sound of a single closely recorded clock tick invites tides and downpours made of hundreds of clock recordings.
His works for solo instruments, chamber ensembles, orchestra, and electronics have been performed by some of the most accomplished soloists and ensembles of our time and premiered internationally at venues like Symphony Space, the International Computer Music Conference, the Seoul International Computer Music Festival, Visiones Sonoras, and June in Buffalo, among others. He has been an invited composer-in-residence at Akademie Schloss Solitude, the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Ecos Urbanos, and Arts Letters & Numbers. Through his partnership with BabelScores, his scores are held in the library collections of institutions worldwide, including the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the British Library, IRCAM, the Juilliard School, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Cambridge, the Conservatoire de Paris, the Koninklijke Conservatorium Den Haag, Ensemble Intercontemporain, and Ensemble Musikfabrik.
He holds a Ph.D. in music composition from the University of California at San Diego, where he worked with Chaya Czernowin, Rand Steiger, and Philippe Manoury, and a B.A. in Music, Science, and Technology from Stanford University, where he studied with Brian Ferneyhough and Mark Applebaum.
New Works
I'm interested in writing for all performers who want to engage seriously with new music, by either building something from scratch around your instrument, ensemble, and programming context or adapting or performing one of my existing works. I'm especially enthusiastic about working with performers who have little or no experience working with a living composer; the most important thing is a desire to explore new musical ideas in an open-ended and collaborative way.
My abiding compositional focus remains on pattern and constraint as a generative force: often inspired by literary or artistic work beyond music, I respond to my experience of the world with highly constrained systems and rules that produce their own peculiar senses of harmony and internal necessity. My work also focuses on listening and attention as both a material and an intentional act. For this reason, I'm drawn to writing for players who love to listen carefully across interlocking and coordinated parts and have strong and inventive opinions about the best way to communicate ideas, transitions, and dynamics that often unfold in unconventional ways.
How It Works
A commission typically begins with a conversation about the occasion, the instrumentation, the duration, and what you're hoping the piece does for your programming. I work closely with performers during the process and regularly invite input on idiomatic detail, usually by sharing informal sketches and recordings. Timeline from commission to delivery is usually six to twelve months depending on scope, but I am open to more ambitious projects.
If you're curious about a specific existing work and whether a new piece in a related direction might suit your needs, that's also a good place to start.
Get in Touch
Or schedule a conversation directly.
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