Vijay Iyer

Vijay Iyer (born October 26, 1971) is an American composer, pianist, bandleader, producer and writer based in New York City.

The New York Times has called him a "social conscience, multimedia collaborator, system builder, rhapsodist, historical thinker and multicultural gateway".

After completing a B.S. degree in mathematics and physics at Yale University in 1992, Iyer attended the University of California, Berkeley, where he obtained an M.A. degree in 1994 and initially to pursue a doctorate in physics.

He continued to pursue his musical interests, playing in ensembles led by the drummers E. W. Wainwright and Donald Bailey.

In 1994, he started working with Steve Coleman and George E. Lewis.

In 1995, concurrently with his composing, recording and touring, he left the Berkeley physics department and assembled an interdisciplinary Ph.D. degree program in technology and the arts, focusing on music cognition.

In 1996, Iyer began collaborating with the saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa, resulting in five albums under Iyer's name (Architextures (1998), Panoptic Modes (2001), Blood Sutra (2003), Reimagining (2005) and Tragicomic (2008)), three under Mahanthappa's name (Black Water, Mother Tongue, Code Book), and a duo album, Raw Materials (2006).

His 1998 dissertation, "Microstructures of Feel, Macrostructures of Sound: Embodied Cognition in West African and African-American Musics", applied the dual frameworks of embodied cognition and situated cognition to the music of the African diaspora.

His graduate advisor was the music perception and computer music researcher David Wessel, with further guidance from Olly Wilson, George E. Lewis, Donald Glaser and Erv Hafter.

Iyer performs internationally with his ensembles and in collaborations.

Among these are his award-winning trios, featured on four albums (Uneasy (2021, ECM), Break Stuff (2015, ECM), Accelerando (2012, ACT) and the Grammy-nominated Historicity (2009, ACT)), his sextet with Graham Haynes, Steve Lehman, Mark Shim, Crump and Tyshawn Sorey, featured on Far From Over (2017, ECM), and his duo project with Wadada Leo Smith, documented on A Cosmic Rhythm with Each Stroke (2016, ECM).

He has collaborated with Amiri Baraka, Teju Cole, Wadada Leo Smith, Arooj Aftab, Steve Coleman, Roscoe Mitchell, Oliver Lake, Henry Threadgill, Reggie Workman, Andrew Cyrille, Amina Claudine Myers, Butch Morris, George E. Lewis, Craig Taborn, Rudresh Mahanthappa, Kassa Overall, Linda May Han Oh, Liberty Ellman, Robert Stewart, Yosvany Terry, Okkyung Lee, Miya Masaoka, Francis Wong, Hafez Modirzadeh, Amir ElSaffar, Matana Roberts, Trichy Sankaran, L. Subramaniam, Zakir Hussain, Aruna Sairam, Pamela Z, Burnt Sugar, Karsh Kale, Mike Ladd, DJ Spooky, dead prez, HPrizm, Das Racist, Himanshu Suri, Will Power, Karole Armitage, the Brentano Quartet, the Imani Winds, the International Contemporary Ensemble, the Parker Quartet, Matt Haimovitz, Claire Chase, Jennifer Koh, Miranda Cuckson, Prashant Bhargava and Haile Gerima.

In 2003, Iyer premiered his first collaboration with the poet-producer-performer Mike Ladd, In What Language?, a song cycle about airports, fear and surveillance before and after 9/11, commissioned by the Asia Society and released in 2004 on Pi Recordings.

His composition Mutations I-X was commissioned and premiered by the string quartet Ethel in 2005.

His next project with Ladd, Still Life with Commentator, a satirical oratorio about 24-hour news culture in wartime, was co-commissioned by UNC-Chapel Hill and the Brooklyn Academy of Music for its 2006 Next Wave Festival.

It was released on CD by Savoy Jazz.

His orchestral work Interventions was commissioned and premiered in 2007 by the American Composers Orchestra conducted by Dennis Russell Davies.

Iyer co-created the score for Teza (2009) by the filmmaker Haile Gerima.

He collaborated with the filmmaker Bill Morrison on the short film and audiovisual installation Release (2009), commissioned by the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, which is now operated as an historic site.

In 2011, he created Mozart Effects, commissioned by the Brentano String Quartet as a response to an unfinished fragment by Mozart.

He also created and performed the score to UnEasy, a ballet choreographed by Karole Armitage and commissioned by Central Park Summerstage.

He was voted Jazz Artist of the Year in the DownBeat magazine international critics' polls in 2012, 2015, 2016, and 2018.

Their third major collaboration, Holding It Down: The Veterans' Dreams Project, focuses on the dreams of young American veterans from the 21st-century wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and was commissioned by Harlem Stage to premiere in 2012.

In 2012, the Silk Road Ensemble debuted his commissioned piece, Playlist for an Extreme Occasion, which appears on its 2013 album A Playlist Without Borders.

Iyer received a 2013 MacArthur Fellowship, a Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, a United States Artists Fellowship, a Grammy nomination, and the Alpert Award in the Arts.

It was released on CD by Pi Recordings in 2013.

In 2013, the International Contemporary Ensemble premiered his composition Radhe Radhe: Rites of Holi, a large-scale collaboration with the filmmaker Prashant Bhargava commissioned by Carolina Performing Arts in commemoration of the centenary of Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring.

In 2013, Brooklyn Rider premiered and recorded his string quartet Dig the Say.

In 2014, he received a lifetime appointment as the Franklin D. and Florence Rosenblatt Professor of the Arts at Harvard University, where he was jointly appointed in the Department of Music and the Department of African and African American Studies.

Born in Albany and raised in Fairport, New York (a suburb of Rochester), he is the son of Indian Tamil immigrants to the United States.

He received 15 years of Western classical training on violin beginning at the age of three.

He began playing the piano by ear in his childhood and is mostly self-taught on that instrument.

It was released on CD by ECM Records in 2014.

In 2014, he premiered Time, Place, Action, a piano quintet he performed with the Brentano Quartet, and Bruits, a sextet for Imani Winds and the pianist Cory Smythe, later recorded on their Grammy-nominated 2021 album of the same name.

Later that year, the moving images by Bhargava, combined with Iyer's music, were released by ECM Records.

Iyer was the 2015–16 Artist in Residence at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

In 2015, he had pieces premiered by the cellist Matt Haimovitz ("Run" for solo cello, an overture to Bach's Cello Suite No. 3) and the violinist Jennifer Koh ("Bridgetower Fantasy", a companion piece to Beethoven's "Kreutzer" Sonata).

He was the music director of the 2017 Ojai Music Festival.

Iyer was the Composer-in-Residence at the Wigmore Hall in London for its 2019–20 season.

Iyer has been active as a composer of concert music.