Benjamin Shorstein

Benjamin Shorstein is a composer of classical and jazz music and a founding member of the creative music collective Madre Vaca. He has been named a finalist for several national and international competitions, including the Franz Schubert Conservatory World Championship in Composition, the American Prize for Chamber Music Composition, and the Ernst Bacon Memorial Award for the Performance of American Music. Shorstein’s music has been performed at the New York Musical Theatre Festival, recorded for film, and featured in concerts and recordings. His jazz arrangement of Franz Schubert’s song cycle Winterreise was named one of the best jazz recordings of 2020 by the Chicago Tribune, with critic Howard Reich writing that “Benjamin Shorstein has created the best kind of jazz-meets-the-classics merger, the two worlds intermingling rather than crashing up against each other.”