Jennifer Higdon

She has won the Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Classical Composition three times. The first was in 2010 for her Percussion Concerto. The second was in 2018 for her Viola Concerto. That concerto was part of an album dedicated to her music on the Naxos label, Higdon: All Things Majestic, Viola Concerto, and Oboe Concerto, which also won the 2018 Grammy for Best Classical Compendium. The third was in 2020 for her Harp Concerto.

Higdon won the annual Pulitzer Prize for Music for her Violin Concerto (Lawdon Press), which premiered February 6, 2009, in Indianapolis. The Pulitzer citation called it "a deeply engaging piece that combines flowing lyricism with dazzling virtuosity". It was commissioned jointly by the Indianapolis Symphony, Toronto Symphony, Baltimore Symphony and the Curtis Institute of Music.

The League of American Orchestras reported Higdon as one of the most performed living American composers, in 2008. "Higdon's music is lithe and expert", wrote Robert Battey of the Washington Post. "Jennifer Higdon's vivid, attractive works have made her a hot commodity lately," wrote Steve Smith of the New York Times. Of her Concerto for Orchestra, Richard Morrison in The Times (London) stated that "it is rare to witness a big new orchestral piece being acclaimed as Jennifer Higdon's Concerto for Orchestra was cheered on ... The most impressive aspect is the panache with which a huge orchestra is deployed ... This colourful, ever-changing instrumental panoply is doubtless one reason why the work makes an instant impression ... Higdon's work is traditionally rooted yet imbued with integrity, freshness and a desire to entertain."

Her works have been recorded on more than four dozen CDs. Her most popular work is blue cathedral, a one-movement tone poem dealing with the death of her brother from cancer, which premiered in 2000. It has been performed by more than 400 orchestras since.

She wrote her first opera based on Charles Frazier's 1997 novel, Cold Mountain with a libretto by Gene Scheer. It was co-commissioned by The Santa Fe Opera and Opera Philadelphia and premiered in Santa Fe in 2015.

Jennifer Elaine Higdon (born December 31, 1962) is an American composer of classical music. She has been a professor of composition at the Curtis Institute of Music since 1994. She has received many awards, including the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Music for her Violin Concerto and three Grammy Awards for Best Contemporary Classical Composition, in 2010, 2018, and 2020. She was elected a Member of the American Philosophical Society in 2019.

Higdon was born in Brooklyn, New York. She spent the first 10 years of her life in Atlanta, Georgia before moving to Seymour, Tennessee. Her father, Charles Higdon, was a painter and made efforts to expose his children to different types of art. He took them to various exhibitions of new and experimental art that gave her her earliest exposure to art and helped her to form an idea of what art was. She also developed an interest in photography and writing at an early age. Despite her early introduction to art, she received very little exposure to classical music in her home. Instead, her early musical education came from listening to rock and folk music from the 1960s. It was not until high school that she joined concert band, where she began playing percussion. At about the same time, she picked up a flute her mother had bought, and she began teaching herself to play using an old flute method book. She played flute in her high school's concert band and percussion in marching band, but heard little classical music before her college years.