Aaron Travers is an assistant professor of composition at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music.
Born in Portsmouth, Va., in 1975, he earned a B.M. in Composition from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music in 1997, studying with Richard Hoffmann, as well as a B.A. in Classics from Oberlin College the same year. He later earned an M.A. and Ph.D. in Composition from the Eastman School of Music in 2003 and 2005, respectively. His teachers there included Sydney Hodkinson, Christopher Rouse, Steven Stucky. and Augusta Read Thomas.
Travers has received numerous awards and commissions. He has twice won the Belle Gitelman Award in Composition and the Howard Hanson Orchestra Prize, both from Eastman. He has also won the AGO/ECS Publishing Award in Choral Composition, the Chicago Symphony First Hearing Award, the Barlow Prize from the Barlow Endowment of Brigham Young University, the Lili Boulanger Memorial Fund Award, and both a Charles Ives Scholarship and Goddard Lieberson Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
He has received commissions from the Frost Wind Ensemble of the University of Miami, Ars Mobilis, the Fromm Foundation, the Howard Hanson Institute for American Music, the Third Coast Percussion Quartet, and the Civic Orchestra of Chicago, among numerous others.
Travers's works have been performed widely throughout the United States and Canada as well as in select locations in France and Mexico. In addition, his pieces have been featured at the Festival Les Solistes aux Serres d'Auteil and the Festival de Violoncelle, both in France, as well as the Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music in Lenox, Mass.
He currently resides in Bloomington, Ind., with his wife, Winnie Cheung, and their son, Rowan.
