Joshua Fineberg

Joshua Fineberg was born in Boston, Massachusetts. He began his musical studies at the age of five. He completed his undergraduate studies at the Peabody Conservatory with Morris Cotel where he won first prize in the bi-annual Virginia Carty de Lillo Composition Competition.

He has worked with many leading composers in the United States and France, including: George Crumb, Jacob Druckman, Robert Hall Lewis, Philippe Manoury, and Andrι Boucourechliev. In 1991, he moved to Paris and studied with Tristan Murail. The following year he was selected by the Ensemble InterContemporain reading panel for the course in composition and musical technologies. In the Fall of 1997, he returned to the US to pursue a doctorate in musical composition at Columbia University, which he completed in May 1999. After teaching at Columbia for a year, he went to Harvard University where he served as the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humainities until 2007. In 2007 he joined the faculty of the Boston University School of Music and became the director of their electronic music studio.

He has collaborated with IRCAM as a lecturer for seminars and as compositional coordinator for their 1996 four week summer course. Besides his compositional and pedagogical activities, he has collaborated with computer scientists and music psychologists to develop tools for computer assisted composition and in music perception research. He has worked with performing ensembles as Artistic Director for recordings of many European ensembles and soloists, and during the 1999–2000 season directed both Speculum Musicae and the Columbia Sinfonietta. Fineberg edited two issues of The Contemporary Music Review on "Spectral Music" (Vol. 19 pt. 2 & 3). In 2003, he became the US editor of the Contemporary Music Review.

Finebergs works include Receuil de Pierre et de sable for two harps and ensemble (commissioned by Radio France and premiered by Continuum), Veils (commissioned by Thomas Kelly and premiered by Robert Levin), and Shards (commissioned by the Fromm Music Foundation and premiered by The New Millennium Ensemble). He worked on an evening-length modern dance/theatre piece with the Belgian choreographer Johanne Saunier and founding member of the Wooster Group Jim Clayburgh based on Nabokovs Lolita.

A monographic CD of his music, recorded by Ensemble Court-Circuit, was released in September 2002 by Universal/Accord in their Una Corda collection with the co-production of MFA and IRCAM. His works have been performed, commissioned and recorded by leading ensembles and soloists in Europe, Asia and the United States

He has won various prizes, fellowships and scholarships including: ASCAP Foundation Grants to Young Composers Competition; Ars Electronica special jury mention; Rapoport Prize in Composition from University; Arnold Salop Composition Competition; the Palache Scholarship, a scholarship to study at the American Conservatory in Fontainebleau; yearly ASCAP Awards from 1991 until he left ASCAP to join the French society SACEM in 1994; and the Randolph S. Rothschild Award in Composition.

In 1992, his work for large orchestra ORIGINS was selected by the international jury of the Gaudeamus foundation as a finalist for the Gaudeamus International Composers Award and was premiered by the Radio Symfonie Orkest of the N.O.S. during the 1992 Gaudeamus Music Week. His “imagined opera” Lolita for actor, dancers, video, ensemble and electronics was premiered in Europe in 2008 and in the United States in 2009 in a version staged by Jim Clayburgh and Johanne Sauniers Joji company. Besides his compositional and pedagogical activities, Joshua Fineberg actively collaborates with computer scientists and music psychologists, and he has been involved in performing ensembles and as artistic director for recordings. Fineberg's book Classical Music, Why Bother? was released in June 2006.