Composer Spotlight: Jennifer Higdon

COMPOSER SPOTLIGHT

Jennifer Higdon Puliter Prize winner. Three time GRAMMY winner is flying into Chicago for the World Premiere of the NLM Commission. Get the rare oppotunity to meet her in person on March 11th.

Art Measures — NLM’s 6th Commission of the Season

She didn’t pick up a flute until she was fifteen. She grew up listening to the Beatles and the Rolling Stones in the mountains of Tennessee, not studying scores. Now she’s a Pulitzer Prize winner, a three-time GRAMMY Award recipient, and one of the most performed composers in American classical music. On March 11, Jennifer Higdon premieres a new work at Nova Linea Musica.

An Unlikely Beginning

Jennifer Higdon didn’t grow up in a conservatory. She grew up listening to the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and Simon & Garfunkel in the mountains of Tennessee, where her father, a painter, took her to exhibitions of experimental art before she ever stepped inside a concert hall. She didn’t pick up a flute until she was fifteen.

That late start didn’t slow her down. It may have sharpened her. Higdon went on to study at the Bowdoin Summer Music Program, then at Wheaton College, then at the Curtis Institute of Music, where she studied with Ned Rorem. She later earned her doctorate at the University of Pennsylvania and joined the Curtis faculty, where she still teaches today.

The path from Tennessee teenager to Pulitzer laureate is not a straight line. It’s a story about a person who came to music on her own terms and never stopped.

One of American Music’s Most Performed Voices

Higdon’s catalog spans orchestral works, chamber music, choral pieces, and opera. Her blue cathedral has become one of the most frequently performed contemporary orchestral works in the United States, with more than 700 performances since its premiere in 1999. Her Violin Concerto won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize in Music. Her opera Cold Mountain, based on Charles Frazier’s novel, won three GRAMMY Awards in 2018, including Best Opera Recording.

She has been commissioned by virtually every major American orchestra, as well as chamber ensembles, soloists, and festivals around the world. Her music is recorded on more than 40 CDs. She is, by almost any measure, one of the central figures in American classical music today. And she agreed to write something new for NLM.

Art Measures

The new work is called Art Measures. It is written for violinist Rabia Brooke and pianist Nathaneal Canfield. It receives its world premiere on March 11, 2026, as part of NLM’s concert “Beyond the Art of Measures” at Guarneri Hall, 11 E Adams St, Chicago.

The piece is organized in three movements: Rosin Grip, Magic Glaze, and Chisel Bits. Each title gestures toward the physical, tactile world of making art, whether that’s a sculptor working stone, a painter applying glaze, or a musician drawing a bow. In her program notes, Higdon writes about art as something fundamentally mysterious, something that happens in the space between intention and execution, between the hand and the material.

It’s a subject she knows from two sides. She is both the composer setting notes on a page and the artist watching someone else bring them to life.

Why This Commission Matters

This is NLM’s 6th commission of the season, and it may be the most prominent name on that list. Commissioning Jennifer Higdon is a statement about what NLM is: an organization that resources new-music creation at the highest level, not just as an aspiration, but as a practice.

On March 11, Higdon will be in the room. She will hear her new work performed live for the first time. That is the rarest kind of concert experience, one that only happens when a commissioning organization has the commitment and the relationships to make it real.

This is what NLM was built to do.

Beyond the Art of Measures takes place March 11, 2026 at 7:30pm. Tickets at novalineamusica.org. 11 E Adams St, Chicago.

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