about

Drawn to a style of expressive abstraction, composer Jeffrey Martin writes music that explores gesture, detail, extremes, and the unexpected. His work has been featured in performances and readings by the JACK Quartet, LIGAMENT, Baltimore Choral Arts Society, Bergamot String Quartet, Strata Trio, Angora Ensemble, Third Practice, University of Iowa Kantorei, and other ensembles, and he has had solo performances by Patrick Crossland and Kylie Little. Originally a choral composer, his output now focuses primarily on solo and chamber forces, as well as computer music. Yet his work spans a diverse range of instrumentations, from orchestra to percussion ensemble to solo clarinet.

His research on computer music covers varied fields including algorithmic granulation, corpus processing, phase vocoder synthesis, and computer-assisted composition and analysis. He has developed multiple software libraries as part of this work. These include aus (a general-purpose audio processing library, hosted on crates.io and downloaded over 8,000 times), pctheory (a library for working with atonal theory concepts and useful for algorithmic composition), and salami slice analyzer (a music21-based symbolic harmony analyzer), among others. His computational study of chord spacing in Elliott Carter's fifth string quartet was presented at Music Theory Midwest in the spring of 2024.

Jeffrey holds a M.A. in music composition from the University of Iowa where he studied composition and computer music with Jean-François Charles, and held teaching assistant appointments in musicianship and theory and the Electronic Music Studios. He also holds undergraduate degrees in music composition (B.A.) and computer science (B.Sc.) from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, studying composition under Linda Dusman, Bradley Green, and Daniel Pesca. In the fall of 2025, he will begin a D.M.A. at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.