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Martin Kennedy (b. 1978) began his training at Indiana University, where he received a B.M. in both Composition and Piano Performance. He went on to earn an M.M. in Composition at Indiana University and a Doctor of Musical Arts at the Juilliard School where he was a C.V. Starr Doctoral Fellow. His principal teachers in composition include Samuel Adler, Milton Babbitt, Claude Baker, David Dzubay, Don Freund, and Sydney Hodkinson. His principal teachers in piano include Jeremy Denk and Evelyne Brancart. Kennedy’s music has been performed internationally by numerous artists and ensembles, including the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Orchestra Teatro Comunale di Bologna, South Dakota Symphony Orchestra, Baton Rouge Symphony Orchestra, Wisconsin Philharmonic, Bloomington Camerata, Symphony in C, and Tuscaloosa Symphony. He is the recipient of several prestigious prizes, including the ASCAP Foundation Rudolf Nissim Prize, the ‘2 Agosto’ International Composition Prize, a BMI Student Composer Award, five ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Awards, the Suzanne and Lee Ettleson prize, the ASCAP Raymond Hubbel Award, fellowships at the MacDowell and Yaddo Artist Colonies, an Aaron Copland Award, and two Indiana University Dean’s Prizes in Composition. Kennedy’s music is available on the Ancalagon, Anbardy, Azica, Centaur, and Riax labels and is published by Theodore Presser Company and G. Schirmer Inc. Previously a member of the academic faculty at Washington University in St. Louis, he is currently the Director of Composition and Theory at Central Washington University in Washington State.
Siren, blind
So they sent their ravishing voices out across the air and the heart inside me throbbed to listen longer.
~Homer, The Odyssey
That voice was a lamentation. Calmer now. It’s in the silence after you feel you hear.
~James Joyce, Ulysses
[It] is still conceivable that someone might possibly have escaped from their singing; but from their silence certainly never.
~Franz Kafka, The Silence of the Sirens
There are ships that sail in the periphery, invisible to temptation or desire. For such travelers, nothing is lost. No helm broken by rocks, they remain obscured by mist, marginalia to the horizon. Many would risk ravage for ecstasy, but instead they journey towards the vanishing point — swallowed by the waves of an ebbing surf, blind to those who beckon from that fatal shore.