Jacob Beranek (b. 1998) is a Wisconsin-born composer and pianist. He currently serves as the first-ever Composer-in-Residence of the Midsummer’s Music Festival, a position he will hold from 2017-2020. After commissioning and premiering his quintet Death’s Door in 2017, Midsummer’s commissioned a new work, Partita melodica for English horn and strings, which was premiered in August 2018. Beyond this relationship, Jacob’s music has been programmed widely, including recent performances in Illinois, Minnesota, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Tennessee, and Wisconsin, as well as the Czech Republic and Switzerland.
His work has garnered national recognition in several competitions, including the Edwin Fissinger Choral Composition Prize, Steven Stucky Young Composers Competition, NFMC Jr. Composers Competition, and Project 21 Prize for Music Composition. He has also received honorable mention in the ACF NextNotes Competition and the American Prize in Composition, in addition to being a Finalist in the ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Awards. Jacob was also honored to be the featured composer at the NFMC’s 2018 National Conference, where he performed his Sonata for Violin and Piano with world-renowned violinist David Perry. Besides self-publishing, Jacob has eight works published by Alliance Publications, Inc. (distributed by Hal Leonard). In addition to composition, Jacob is a serious pianist and avid devotee of Czech music due to his heritage. He has had the privilege of studying music in Prague during visits in 2015 and 2017, and is looking forward to returning for a week in November 2018 for the European premiere of his piece Památník at Prague Castle by the Band of the Castle Guards & Czech Police. Jacob has served as a Composition Fellow at the Talis Festival & Academy in Saas-Fee, Switzerland, and has also studied at the Curtis Institute of Music Young Artist Summer Program and Jr. Composers Studio & Institute. He is currently pursuing a Bachelor of Music in Composition at Vanderbilt University’s Blair School of Music, where he has studied with Michael Kurek, Michael Alec Rose, and Stan Link. September 2018 |
Thanks Be to God!Bohu díky!
In all of my compositions, I strive to achieve one main goal: to uplift the audience. I believe that music should be a journey, an artistic narrative that will enlighten listeners with a sense of hope and direction. This is not to say that all my work is programmatic, or even "happy," but simply that I intend for every piece to capture and carry an audience’s attention in a meaningful way. I firmly trust in divine inspiration and believe that it is my responsibility as an artist to share the products of this inspiration with others via my own hard work and skill. It is my conviction that music provides the most powerful, spiritual method of communication available, and it is through this that we can bring harmony into a dissonant world.
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