Jason Huffman

Jason Huffman (b.1978) was born and raised just outside Minneapolis and has made Boston his home for over 20 years. Though not exposed to classical music at an early age, he was drawn to self-taught score study after performing a band arrangement of Haydn’s Trumpet Concerto in high school. From there emerged a fledgling series of solo works — mostly in concerto form — for various instruments and full orchestra as studies in writing, first for his own instrument, and then for more-and less-familiar ones (trumpet, piccolo trumpet, horn, violin, horn, clarinet, oboe).

He received a Bachelor of Music in Composition and Trumpet Performance from Oberlin Conservatory and a Master of Music in Composition from Boston Conservatory (where, upon graduation, he received the Roger Sessions Memorial Composition Award). His primary teachers of composition have included Richard Hoffmann, Curtis Hughes, Dalit Warshaw, and Jan Swafford, with additional studies with Andy Vores, Edward Miller, Randolph Coleman, John Luther Adams, John Harbison, Pauline Oliveros, Christian Wolff, John Adams, Tan Dun, and Louis Lane.

Huffman’s work takes inspiration from the interplay of mathematics and human interaction with the perception of time and sound, and has been described as “work[ing] in tight, efficient, deliberately limited vocabularies” (New Music Box). His works often take cues from the sparse northern landscapes of his American Midwestern roots and Scandinavian heritage, their form working within glacially evolving blocks of rhythm and development. Recent compositional interests include works conceived with modular and optional instrumentation and asynchronous and loosely-coordinated interaction among multiple groups of instruments.

His music has been played by the Boston Conservatory (now Berklee) Wind and Brass Ensembles, Equilibrium Ensemble, Ludovico Ensemble, Juventas New Music, Ensemble Interface, Callithumpian Consort, the DMC percussion-clarinet duo, Bay Colony Brass, Oberlin Brass Ensemble, the Charles River Wind Ensemble, the Metropolitan Wind Symphony, and Boston Modern Brass. He performs regularly with Sound Icon, Equilibrium Ensemble, New England Philharmonic, and the Charles River Wind Ensemble.