Photography by Landon Speers
Max Vinetz’s music draws inspiration and meaning from intersections between improvisatory, popular, and traditional forms/aesthetics, and how these various intersections can be mapped onto musical narrative and identity transformation over time. His work centers the perception of rhythmic and timbral events and is concerned with the relationships between narrative, storytelling, musical objects, and sonic artifacts as they relate to music and other forms of media.
Max is a recipient of a Fromm Foundation Commission, two ASCAP Morton Gould awards, the Paul and Christiane Cooper Prize, and the Gardner Prize from the American Viola Society. He has received additional recognition and awards from Musiqa, loadbang, the Hausmann Quartet, Young Concert Artists, New York Youth Symphony, BMI, Danbury Music Center, Symphony No. 1, Donald Sinta Quartet, Tesla Quartet, and Yale University, and the Shepherd School of Music. His music has been featured at numerous festivals, including Mizzou International Composers Festival, CULTIVATE, Norfolk New Music Workshop, Fontainebleau (FR), New Music On the Point, Brevard Music Center, California Summer Music, Red Note New Music Festival, Nebula Ensemble Summer Festival, nief-norf, Valencia International Performance Academy, and highSCORE.
As a Yale undergraduate, Max won the Beekman Cannon Friends Prize, awarded for a “musical composition exhibiting unusual originality and promise,” the Abraham Beekman Cox Prize awarded to the “most promising and gifted composer” in the junior class, and was also awarded the Lewis P. Curtis Fellowship, the Tristan Perlroth Prize, and the R.J.R. Cohen Fellowship for Musical Performance.
Max's works and have been performed and recorded by JACK Quartet, Bearthoven, Bergamot Quartet, arx Duo, Vicky Chow, Contemporaneous, DITHER, Variant 6, Sō Percussion, The Shepherd School Symphony Orchestra, Arditti Quartet, Ensemble Dal Niente, Miranda Cuckson, NUNC, Ensemble for New Music Tallinn, Hear&Now, Music From Copland House, DeCoda, Mivos Quartet, unassisted fold, Yale Symphony Orchestra, New York Youth Symphony, Icarus Duo, members of Yale Voxtet, and Yale Schola Cantorum, among others. Upcoming projects include an EP with Composer/Vocalist Anson Jones, electroacoustic works for Hub New Music and TAK Ensemble, and an evening length work for panSonus.
A graduate of both Yale and Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music, Max is currently pursuing his PhD in Composition at Princeton University as a Naumburg Doctoral Fellow (ABD).