NOAH JENKINS

Noah Jenkins is a composer, musician, and teacher from Oregon, living in New York City. Inspired by tuning, acoustic phenomena, synthesizers, field recordings, and experiences of sound in space and time, his work foregrounds basic elements of music and seeks to reveal their nature and the nature of their relationships through micro-variation and slow change across clear forms.

His recent work for piano and percussion, a diapason, a diatesseron, a double suprabipartient, was commissioned by Flannau Duo and will be included on their upcoming album. In January 2025, John Adams conducted the LA Phil New Music Group in the world premiere of Not a dream sound, but a sound which sleeping we had really heard, a work for string orchestra, keyboards, and antiphonal percussion commissioned by the LA Phil. Chicago’s 2025 Frequency Festival opened with the premiere of Poetics of Space Translation Symmetry (featuring Nois and Varo String Quartet), a 40-minute string and sax octet featuring spatial arrangement with the strings centered in the performance space and the saxophones posted around the perimeter.

In 2024 Jenkins released Without Persistent Environments (Sawyer Editions), an album of two electroacoustic trombone pieces recorded by Chicago trombonist and composer Riley Leitch. Peter Margasak (Bandcamp) praised the music’s “sustained lines awash in luxurious overtones” and its “focus on the dynamic interaction of sound drifting into eternity.”

Noah holds a PhD in Music Composition from Northwestern University and a BM in Composition and Violin Performance from the University of Oregon. Following posts at Northwestern and UW-Milwaukee, he now teaches privately in New York.

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