Bio

Composer John Fitz Rogers's music has been performed and commissioned by ensembles, festivals, and venues such as Alarm Will Sound, Bang on a Can Marathon, Third Coast Percussion, American Modern Ensemble, Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble, Ear Taxi Festival, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, National Cathedral, the Albany, Louisville, Charleston, and Tulsa Symphony Orchestras, South Carolina Philharmonic, New York Youth Symphony, World Saxophone Congress, Bennington Chamber Music Conference, the MATA, Rockport, Bumbershoot, Bravo! Vail, and Bowling Green festivals, Festival of New American Music, Phillips Collection Concert Series, the College Band Directors National Association and the Percussive Arts Society national conferences, as well as by chamber ensembles such as Dark in the Song, Duo Cortona, New Century Saxophone Quartet, Capitol Quartet, Sympatico Percussion Group, Lionheart, Composers, Inc., Opus Two, and the Meehan/Perkins Duo.

Rogers has received many fellowships and awards, including those from ASCAP, New Music USA, the American Composers Forum and the Jerome Foundation, Music at the Anthology and the Mary Flagler Cary Trust, National Flute Association, MacDowell Colony, South Carolina Arts Commission, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council, as well as the Heckscher Foundation Composition Prize. Rogers’s recordings include Once Removed, a collection of his chamber music, and Magna Mysteria, for soprano, choir, and chamber orchestra, both on Innova Recordings. Additional recordings include those on New Focus Recordings, Concert Artist Guild Records, MSR, Equilibrium, Albany, White Pine, Alanna, Mark Masters, and Gale Recordings.  

A dedicated advocate for contemporary music, Rogers founded and directed the Southern Exposure New Music Series, which received a Chamber Music America / ASCAP Award for Adventurous Programming. He holds degrees in music from Cornell University, the Yale School of Music, and Oberlin College, where he studied composition, piano, and conducting; his composition teachers included Steven Stucky, Roberto Sierra, Martin Bresnick, Jacob Druckman, and Randolph Coleman. Rogers has served on the faculties of Cornell University and the Longy School of Music, as composer-in-residence for the Chamber Music Conference and Composers Forum of the East, Conductor's Institute of South Carolina, the Southeastern Piano Festival, and the Frontwave New Music Festival, and as visiting faculty for the Composition Intensive Program at the Yellow Barn Chamber Music Festival. Rogers is a Professor of Composition at the University of South Carolina School of Music as well as composition faculty at the Vermont College of Fine Arts.

[November 2022]