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, a Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Jacob Druckman Prize from Aspen Music Festival, 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 the Albany Symphony, New Jersey Council for the Arts, 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, presented, and recorded by JACK Quartet, Alarm Will Sound, TAK ensemble, panSonus, Bergamot Quartet, arx Duo, Stare at the Sun, Bearthoven, Vicky Chow, Contemporaneous, New Jersey Symphony Orchestra, Allentown Symphony, Texas Medical Center Orchestra, San Francisco Contemporary Music Player, DITHER, Hub New Music, Variant 6, Sō Percussion, Bakken Ensemble, The Shepherd School Symphony Orchestra, Arditti Quartet, Bakken Ensemble, 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 works for soprano/double bass for Confluss, Dogs of Desire, Albany Symphony, Aruna Quartet, Flannau Duo and Exceptet.
Max holds degrees from Yale University, Rice University Shepherd School of Music, and Princeton University. He counts Steve Mackey, Donnacha Dennehy, Dan Trueman, Tyondai Braxton, Juri Seo, Dmitri Tymoczko, Chris Theofanidis, Kurt Stallmann, Karim Al-Zand, and Kathryn Alexander among his important teachers and mentors.