‘Brilliant energetic rhythmic figures…imaginative sonorities and harmonies that always move, always inflect’. — American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Composer and pianist John Aylward grew up in the Sonoran Desert, on the border of Arizona and Mexico, a child of an immigrant mother from Germany (herself a World War II refugee) and in circumstances of both tremendous diversity and economic instability. His music processes the impacts of that earlier life, filled with a deep sense of community, rich expressions of converging cultural histories, and the otherworldly landscapes of the desert. His work is influenced by a wide ranging love of literature, from Sartre and Jung to Calvino, Melville and contemporary poets Louise Gluck, Robert Lowell and Dean Young, and like the poets and philosophers who inspire him, his music questions our fundamental personal and worldly relationships.

John is a John S. Guggenheim Foundation fellowship recipient, and has been a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University. He has been twice awarded by the American Academy of Arts and Letters and has also been awarded residencies at MacDowell, the Virginia Center for the Arts, and other artist spaces. He is the recipient of commissions from the Fromm Foundation at Harvard and the Koussevitzky Commission at the Library of Congress. Early in his career, he won First Prize from the International Society for Contemporary Music.

John is also an active teacher, scholar and performer, and a co-director of Ecce Arts, a non profit performance art group. He lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.