ABOUT
Composer Aaron Helgeson (b. 1982, Eugene OR) uses transcription, adaptation, and collage to mix contemporary sounds with historical sources like wax cylinders, medieval psalms, and unfinished manuscripts.
Described by Cleveland Classical as "eerily beautiful" and the New York Times as a "virtuoso display of engaging drama”, Helgeson's music has received awards and grants from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Fromm Music Foundation, Aaron Copland Fund, Barlow Endowment, ASCAP, and American Composers Forum.
In 2016 he received an Ohio Arts Council Award for his Snow Requiem, an "anti-cantata" based on author David Laskin’s book The Children’s Blizzard about the Homestead-era snowstorm of the same name combining original transcriptions of Norwegian-American immigrant folk music with sonifications of weather data using orchestral tone clusters, wordless vocal chorales, and percussive noise.
His choral cycle The Book of Never for Grammy Award winning chorus The Crossing collages ancient hymns from the Novgorod Codex (a medieval book of Russian psalm chant overwritten hundreds of times with heretical sermons by an excommunicated Pagan missionary) with contemporary texts by writers in various states of exile.
Other recent projects include Poems of Sheer Nothingness commissioned by soprano Susan Narucki using fragmented realizations of ancient Occitan troubadour poems, Calls of Close and Away for Imani Winds on 19th-century French hunting calls and 20th-century American military signals, and Echoes of Always for Ensemble Dal Niente assembled from scraps of Baroque opera overtures and bits of Helgeson's own previous music. Recordings of his music are available on Carrier Records, Oberlin Music, and Innova Recordings.
Also a scholar of creativity and mental health in the arts, Helgeson is frequently invited to teach workshops in creative wellness at educational programs around the country, working with young artists to find holistic ways of living and working. His 2021 article for American Composers Forum The Doppelgänger Within: How Depression Hides in the Creative Process discusses the way creative work can lead to mental health problems, documenting his own depression and the creative methods that have helped him manage it. In 2023, he was named an Artist Fellow with the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, collaborating with clinical psychologist and Harvard University professor Alfred Marguiles in exploring the relationship between creativity and the unconscious.
Helgeson serves as Associate Professor of Composition and Music Theory at Montclair State University's Cali School of Music, previously serving as department chair of composition and music theory at the Longy School of Music of Bard College. He also taught as Assistant Professor of Composition at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, with other visiting appointments at the Hartt School of Performing Arts, University of Chicago, New York University, and the University of California Washington Center. In addition, he has given lectures and masterclasses at institutions like Northwestern University, Mannes School of Music, Stanford University, and the Internationale Musikinstitut Darmstadt. He holds degrees in music and theater from the University of California San Diego (PhD, MA) and Oberlin College (BMus, BA).
He currently resides in New York where he serves on the advisory board of Creatives Care, a non-profit facilitating low-cost psychological treatment for performing artists.
