Gregory Spears writes music that combines elements of Early Music and Minimalist structural practices within a Romantic sound world. In addition to classical music sounds, his pieces have used dog-whistle choirs, wobbling microcassette players, crackling record players, patty-cake routines, shattering glass, and burning matches. The New York Times described Eighth Blackbird's performance of his piece Soar-Stop as "scintillating." The Philadelphia Inquirer has called his music "remarkable" and a "glistening sonic soup."
Spears was born in 1977 and grew up in Virginia Beach receiving his first musical recognition at age 16 as the soloist in his own Piano Concerto. Spears has since written for groups including So Percussion, the Eighth Blackbird Ensemble, the Traces Percussion Duo, the vocal group Ars Nova, the Zapolsky Quartet and the Synapse Ensemble Chamber Orchestra in Montreal. He was awarded a First Music Commission in 1999 to write a piece for the New York Youth Symphony, which was given its premiere in Carnegie Hall in May of 2000. In 2001 the American Composers Orchestra played his orchestral work Circle Stories during their annual Whitaker New Music Readings in New York. Recent commissions have come from The Greater Princeton Youth Orchestra, the Present Music Ensemble in Milwaukee and New York choreographer Christopher Williams.
Other recent projects have included a 5-channel tape work premiered in Copenhagen’s Cathedral on Good Friday sponsored by Danish National Radio as well as a series of piano etudes for Pianist Janelle Fung written during a residency at Yaddo. In 2005 Spears began playing and composing for the Owen Quartet, a group of musicians dedicated to bridging the gap between contemporary and traditional repertoire. Spears is currently working with musicologist Simon Morrison to realize the original score for Prokofiev's ballet Romeo and Juliet for premiere by the Mark Morris Dance Group and the Bard Festival in 2008.
In addition to his work as a composer, Spears teaches a Freshman Writing Seminar at Princeton called Music and Madness, exploring the popularized link between creativity and mental illness.
As a composer, Spears has won multiple prizes from both BMI and ASCAP including the Carlos Surinach prize in 1999 as well as grants and honors from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Fulbright Foundation and the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival. He was named a prizewinner in the 2000 Vagn Holmboe Competition in Horsens Denmark for his string quartet, which was subsequently broadcast on Danish National Radio.
Greg studied composition at the Eastman School of Music under Augusta Read Thomas, Joseph Schwantner, Christopher Rouse, David Liptak and Sidney Hodkinson and piano performance with Tony Caramia and Fernando Laires. After receiving his Bachelors degree in 1999, Spears traveled to Copenhagen as a Fulbright Scholar and enrolled at the Royal Danish Academy of Music. There he studied the practices of Early Danish Minimalism and orchestration with composers Hans Abrahamsen and Per Nørgård. Upon returning to the States Spears received his Masters degree in composition at the Yale School of Music where he studied with Ezra Laderman and Martin Bresnick. Spears received a Ph.D. in 2007 from Princeton University.