Vijay Iyer & Jennifer Koh – Music from Scenes of Living and Dying
Music from Scenes of Living and Dying
JENNIFER KOH, violin
VIJAY IYER, composer, piano, electronics
Violinist Jennifer Koh and composer-pianist Vijay Iyer present a new musical work about loss, healing, and celebration. Scenes of Living and Dying explores the human relationship to the thresholds of life: births, deaths, transformations, and awakenings. Drawing inspiration from various cultural touchstones of memory and grief, the music takes the form of a collection of sonic scenes, ceremonies, and conjurings, ranging from tender to severe, fragile to robust, melancholy to celebratory, in an offering of communion across life’s existential divide.
JENNIFER KOH Grammy Award-winning violinist Jennifer Koh is celebrated for her commanding performances and dedication to both traditional and contemporary repertoire. Equally at home in works from Bach to today’s composers, she is recognized for her dazzling virtuosity, breadth of musical curiosity, and fearless approach to programming. Koh has premiered more than 100 works and developed groundbreaking commissioning projects that have redefined the contemporary violin repertoire. Named Musical America’s 2016 Instrumentalist of the Year, Koh has won the International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow, Concert Artists Guild Competition, and an Avery Fisher Career Grant. She has a BA in English literature from Oberlin College and studied at the Curtis Institute, where she worked with Jaime Laredo and Felix Galimir. She is an active lecturer, teacher, and recording artist for Cedille Records. Koh is Artistic Director of the Kennedy Center’s Fortas Chamber Music Concerts and Artistic Director of arco collaborative, an artist-driven nonprofit.
VIJAY IYER has carved out a unique path as an influential, prolific, shape-shifting presence in twenty-first-century music. A composer and pianist active and revered across multiple musical communities, Iyer has created a consistently innovative, emotionally resonant body of work over the last three decades, earning him a place as one of the leading music-makers of his generation. His honors include a MacArthur Fellowship, a Doris Duke Artist Award, a United States Artist Fellowship, three Grammy nominations, and the Alpert Award in the Arts. His newest albums are Fifteen (Nonesuch, 2026), an all-star collective with composer-performers Henry Threadgill and Dafnis Prieto; Defiant Life (ECM, 2025), his second suite of duets with visionary composer-trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith; Compassion (ECM, 2024), featuring his celebrated trio with drummer Tyshawn Sorey and bassist Linda May Han Oh; Thereupon (Pi Recordings, 2025), by the group Fieldwork (Iyer, Sorey, and saxophonist Steve Lehman); Trouble (BMOP/sound, 2024), a composer portrait album comprising three of his orchestral works, including the titular violin concerto performed by Jennifer Koh; and Love in Exile (Verve, 2023), his Grammy-nominated collaboration with Arooj Aftab and Shahzad Ismaily. The New York Times observed, “Iyer’s music has always been both intelligent and unpretentious, complex without being opaque; [he] ponders a phrase with obsessive rumination, unveiling layers of shifting, subtle emotion, before letting it fly with joyous abandon.” He is a professor at Harvard University.
