About

Jascha Narveson was raised in a concert hall and put to sleep as a child with an old vinyl copy of the Bell Labs mainframe computer singing "Bicycle Built for Two." He now makes music for people, machines, and interesting combinations of people and machines.

Born into Southern Ontario home filled with recordings and live house concerts, Jascha Narveson early on adopted voracious listening as part of his lifelong identity. He is now a composer, audio engineer, and teacher based in New York City. His work ranges from scored pieces for live performance, software for live electronic performance, electronic music for contemporary dance companies, home listening, and multichannel installations, and, increasingly, computer-generated video.

Jascha's music has been premiered by ensembles such as Ensemble Klang, NOW Ensemble, the Penderecki String Quartet, and the Dither electric guitar quartet, as well as soloists such as former Bang on a Can cellist Ashley Bathgate and piano/percussion new-music hero Danny Holt. He's part of the team that created “The Gaits,” a participatory smartphone-enabled sound walk that has been hosted by The High Line park in Manhattan annually since 2011. His dance scores have been used by Lucy Rupert and Blue Ceiling Dance in Toronto, Dancetheater David Earle in Guelph, Naomi Goldberg Haas's Dances for a Variable Population project, and post-Butoh dance duo E/D in New York City.

He is a founding member of Sideband, a "laptop band" that serves as the professional touring outgrowth of the Princeton Laptop Orchestra, as well as a co-organizer of New Music Gathering, an annual conference dedicated to new and experimental music that takes place in different locations across the United States each year. He holds an MA from Wesleyan University's esteemed experimental music program and a PhD in Music Composition from Princeton University.

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