Drew Flieder is a composer and music theorist from Morristown, New Jersey, currently based in Dayton, Ohio. His music has been performed in the United States and Europe, and he received the 2019 Bernard Rogers Memorial Prize. His composition teachers have included Robert Morris, Matthew Barber, Curtis Roads, and JoAnn Kuchera-Morin. His work in music theory has been published in the Journal of Mathematics and Music and Perspectives of New Music (forthcoming).
My work is motivated by a concern for the present state of Western art music, particularly the enduring tension between musical conception and musical perception that reached an extreme point in the post–World War II avant-garde, and continues to influence much contemporary musical thought. I am interested in how music holds attention through the intelligibility of its forms, and how the mind’s sustained apprehension of those forms grounds aesthetic experience.
My work is divided between composition and a parallel theoretical project.
As a composer, I write concert music in the lineage of the Western art music tradition, with influences ranging from Medieval and Renaissance polyphony through the common-practice period and into the twentieth century. For several years my work followed the aesthetic trajectories of late twentieth-century composers such as Iannis Xenakis, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and John Cage. More recently, I have sought a different musical orientation, pursuing an approach to harmony that preserves much of the structural depth of common-practice tonality while accommodating the broader harmonic palette of twentieth-century music.
As a theorist, I am working toward a systematic understanding of music that integrates its conceptual, perceptual, and evaluative dimensions within a unified framework. This work draws on philosophy—including phenomenology, semiotics, and aesthetics—as well as contemporary mathematical approaches to structure. My goal is not to subordinate music to theory, but to help reorient musical thought toward its proper end: the cultivation of intelligible beauty.