Composer
About
Jesse Reuben Jennings is a composer based in Boston. Noted by The Boston Globe for his "level of quality and imagination," Jesse's compositions are often inspired by images, places, and Baroque forms.
Jesse has been honored by the Tanglewood Music Center with the Leonard Bernstein Fellowship and by New England Conservatory with a Dean’s Scholarship. His compositions Reservoir and Pas de Deux were premiered at Tanglewood by the New Fromm Players, and he was selected to take part in the 2024 Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival’s Young Composers String Quartet Project with the FLUX Quartet. He won the New England Conservatory Orchestral Composition Competition for his piece Five Miniatures from Greenwich Village and the New England Conservatory Honors Ensemble Competition for his composition Orange Twilight, which was premiered by Quartet Luminera, the winners of the Silver Medal at the 2023 Fischoff Chamber Music Competition. He was a finalist for the ASCAP Foundation Morton Gould Young Composer Awards and a national finalist for the Music Teachers National Association Composition Competition.
As a multimedia composer, Jesse has collaborated with NYU filmmakers on short films and contributed additional music to the 2023 documentary I Go to the Rock: The Gospel Music of Whitney Houston. Along with the 2023 Tanglewood Composition Fellows, he composed original scores for the silent films Meshes of the Afternoon (dir. Maya Deren), The Life and Death of 9413: a Hollywood Extra (dir. Robert Florey, Slavko Vorkapić), and One Week (dir. Buster Keaton, Edward F. Cline).
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Jesse is currently pursuing a doctorate in Composition at the New England Conservatory of Music and studies with Michael Gandolfi. He completed a master’s degree in Screen Scoring at New York University, where he studied with Paul Chihara, and a Composition fellowship at Tanglewood, where he studied with Joan Tower, Osvaldo Golijov, George Lewis, and John Harbison. Before pursuing a career in composition, he studied piano for 15 years and Physics at the University of Edinburgh, where he sang in the Edinburgh University Chamber Choir. He is a member of ASCAP and the Society of Lyricists & Composers.