Steven Mackey, a guitarist in his own right, counts among the small group of composers who have created parts for electric guitar within classical frameworks. He has also earned distinction as a teacher.
Born on February 14, 1956, in Frankfurt, West Germany, to American parents, Mackey performed rock guitar throughout his teenage years. Rock and blues maintained an ongoing influence on his later writing, yet an encounter at age 19 with the String Quartet No. 16 in F major, Op. 135, by Beethoven, heard on a car radio—specifically its striking unison E flat in the second movement—led him to resolve on a career in composition. At the University of California at Davis he completed undergraduate studies summa cum laude, then earned a master’s degree at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and a PhD at Brandeis University.
Shortly after finishing his training he joined the Princeton University faculty, where he has continued to teach into the early 2020s. Following guest appearances on recordings by other artists, he issued his own first album, Lost & Found, on the Bridge label in 1996. Subsequent releases have appeared under his name, while his compositions—some without electric guitar—have been realized by additional performers.
He has been granted several of the leading honors in American classical music, among them a Guggenheim fellowship, a Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and two awards from the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. As an electric guitar soloist he has appeared with the Arditti Quartet, the Kronos Quartet, and the New World Symphony. Composer-in-residence appointments have taken him to the Tanglewood Music Festival, the Aspen Music Festival, and other festivals.
Prominent among his works are Troubadour Songs for string quartet and electric guitar (1991), Dreamhouse for solo tenor, vocal quartet, electric guitar quartet and orchestra (2003), which received multiple Grammy award nominations, and A Beautiful Passing for violin and orchestra (2008), written in memory of his mother. He has composed several operas and has remained productive into the early 2020s, producing the Concerto for Curved Space, given its premiere in 2022 by the Boston Symphony Orchestra under Andris Nelsons, and RIOT, first heard with Mackey himself on electric guitar together with mezzo-soprano Alicia Olatuja, the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra, the Princeton University Glee Club, and conductor Xian Zhang. He serves as co-director of the Princeton Composers’ Ensemble and has received that university’s distinguished teaching award; in 2022 he also joined the faculty of the Curtis Institute of Music.
