2023 Resident Composer Spotlight: Max Vinetz

Max Vinetz is one of eight Resident Composers selected for the 2023 Mizzou International Composers Festival from among 500 applicants, 28% from outside USA, namely the United Kingdom, Canada, Italy, and Brazil.  

Vinetz is an American composer whose music draws inspiration from various intersections between improvisatory, popular, and classical forms and aesthetics. His recent and upcoming works address grief, the impact of media on rhetorical structures in music and our daily lives, and structures that circumvent linear narratives. 

Vinetz is a two-time recipient of ASCAP’s Morton Gould Award, a Fromm Foundation Commission, the Paul and Christiane Cooper Prize, the Gardner Prize from the American Viola Society, and was the 2019-2020 Emerging Composer Fellow for Musiqa. He has received additional recognition and awards from Loadbang, the Hausmann Quartet, Young Concert Artists, New York Youth Symphony, BMI, Danbury Music Center, Symphony No. 1, Donald Sinta Quartet, Tesla Quartet, and Yale University, and the Shepherd School of Music. His music has been featured at numerous festivals, including Norfolk New Music Workshop, Fontainebleau (FR), New Music On the Point, Brevard Music Center, California Summer Music, Red Note New Music Festival, Nebula Ensemble Summer Festival, Nief-Norf, Valencia International Performance Academy, and highSCORE. 

As a Yale undergraduate, Vinetz won the Beekman Cannon Friends Prize, awarded for a “musical composition exhibiting unusual originality and promise,” the Abraham Beekman Cox Prize awarded to the “most promising and gifted composer” in the junior class, and was also awarded the Lewis P. Curtis Fellowship, the Tristan Perlroth Prize, and the R.J.R. Cohen Fellowship for Musical Performance (2017, 2018). 

Vinetz’s works have been performed and recorded by Beethoven, Bergamot Quartet, arx Duo, Vicky Chow, Contemporaneous, DITHER, Variant 6, Sō Percussion, The Shepherd School Symphony Orchestra, Arditti Quartet, Ensemble Dal Niente, Miranda Cuckson, NUNC, Ensemble for New Music Tallinn, Hear&Now, Copland House Chamber Players, DeCoda, Mivos Quartet, unassisted fold, Yale Symphony Orchestra, New York Youth Symphony, Icarus Duo, members of Yale Voxtet, and Yale Schola Cantorum, among others. Upcoming projects include works for Alarm Will Sound, Yarn/Wire, and panSonus. 

A graduate of both Yale and Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music, Vinetz is currently pursuing his Ph.D. Composition at Princeton University as a Naumburg Doctoral Fellow.  

For the MICF, Vinetz is presenting sear (2023), which will be performed on Saturday, July 29 at 7:30 pm at the Missouri Theater. The concert will feature Alarm Will Sound playing world premiere performances by Resident Composers. 

You can hear samples of Max Vinetz’s music on his website