John
Heiss
Director of Contemporary Ensemble;
Flute; Chamber Music; Composition, Music History and Musicology;
Music Theory
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John Heiss is an active composer, conductor, flutist, and teacher. His works have been performed worldwide, receiving premieres by Speculum Musicae, Boston Musica Viva, Collage New Music, the Da Capo Chamber Players, Aeolian Chamber Players, Tanglewood Festival Orchestra, and Alea III. He has received awards and commissions from the National Institute of Arts and Letters, Fromm Foundation, NEA, Rockefeller Foundation, Massachusetts Council on the Arts and Humanities, ASCAP, and the Guggenheim Foundation. His principal publishers are Boosey & Hawkes, E.C. Schirmer, and Elkus & Son. Heiss has been principal flute of Boston Musica Viva and has performed with many local ensembles, including the BSO. His articles on contemporary music have appeared in Winds Quarterly, Perspectives of New Music, and The Instrumentalist. Heiss has directed fifteen of NEC’s annual festivals, plus visits by many composers including Ligeti, Lutoslawski, Berio, Carter, Messiaen, Schuller, and Tippett. Along with Juilliard faculty Joel Sachs, Heiss has designed and written a book/CD-Rom classical music primer for Blue Marble Music entitled Classical Explorer.
At Commencement 1998, John Heiss received NEC's Louis and Adrienne Krasner Teaching Excellence Award.
B.A. in mathematics, Lehigh University; M.F.A., music, Princeton University. Composition with Milton Babbitt, Edward T. Cone, Earl Kim, Otto Luening, Darius Milhaud; flute with Arthur Lora, James Hosmer, Albert Tipton. Recordings on TelArc, Nonesuch, CRI, Golden Crest, Arista, Turnabout, Video Artists International, Boston Records, AFKA. Former faculty of Columbia University, Barnard College, MIT, NEC Institute at Tanglewood.