Jeffrey Mumford

Jeffrey Mumford is an American composer born in Washington, D.C., in 1955. His training took place at several universities in California and in the federal capital, where his teachers included Peter Odegard, Lawrence Moss and Bernard Rands, among others. He later completed his studies in New York with Elliott Carter, one of the central figures of American music in the second half of the twentieth century.

His career received support from a range of institutions. He won awards from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations and from the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, and received commissions from the Library of Congress (1986), the National Symphony Orchestra (1995), Meet the Composer (1996), and the Fromm (1990) and Naumberg (1991) Foundations.

From his earliest works, Mumford showed an interest in long, fanciful and lyrical lines of contrasting character, layered in simultaneous strands of activity. Later he began to use poetic titles evoking images of clouds, and drew an analogy between his style and the movement of clouds: a constant cycle of separation and recombination, dissipation and reformation, with layers advancing at different speeds. Two orchestral works, as the air softens in dusklight (1994) and within a cloudburst of echoing brightness (1995), illustrate how he uses these procedures to create intense drama and marked lyricism.

His catalogue includes concertos for violin and viola, chamber music, vocal works, and pieces for piano and for solo instruments. His recordings have appeared on the CRI and Albany labels, and his music is published mainly by Presser.