Jared Miller

photo credit: Terry Lim

Canadian-American composer Jared Miller is emerging as an important voice in his generation. At age 25, he has worked in collaboration with many ensembles both in North America and internationally including the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony, the Juilliard Orchestra, the Contemporary Youth Orchestra, the Sneak Peek Orchestra, Latitude 49 Ensemble and a long list of soloists that include pianists Sara Davis Buechner, Ang Li and Imri Talgam and violinist Francisco Fullana. His orchestral work 2010 Traffic Jam was commissioned by the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra for the 2010 Olympics and has since been performed over two dozen times. He has won numerous awards for composition that include a 2012 ASCAP Morton Gould Award, the 2011/12 Juilliard Orchestra Competition and the 2011 SOCAN Competition for Young Composers. An active pianist as well, Miller has performed at a variety of venues including Carnegie Hall’s Weill Hall, Lincoln Center and the Chan Center for the Performing Arts in Vancouver, BC. As a passionate advocate for musical education and outreach Miller has worked for several initiatives including the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra Connects Program, the BC Health Arts Society, Vancouver’s Opera in the Schools and for New York’s Opportunity Music Project.

Born in Los Angeles in 1988 and raised in Vancouver Canada, Miller completed his undergraduate studies at the University of British Columbia in composition with Stephen Chatman and Dorothy Chang and in piano with Sara Davis Buechner and Corey Hamm. He is currently a C.V. Starr Doctoral Fellow at the Juilliard School where he studies with John Corigliano and Samuel Adler. Beginning in the 2014/15 season he will be the Composer-in-Residence for the Victoria Symphony in British Columbia, Canada.

Contrasted Perspectives:
Over the past year, I have fallen in love with visual art, poetry and film from the Surrealist movement. Both the expansive, dream-like worlds and confluence of juxtaposing elements created by artists like Salvador Dalí, Joan Miró, Frederico García Lorca and Frederico Fellini (amongst others) have appealed to me greatly and have had a significant influence on my work. This piece attempts to explore these contrasting emotional worlds: the dream-like and the juxtaposed. The first movement, “Dalí” is most significantly influenced by his famous painting The Persistence of Memory.