Jacob Leibowitz
Jacob Leibowitz is a composer and bassist who takes pride in his ability to shape his audience’s experience through time, using both the mediums of sound/silence and visuals that are present in his music videos and some of his live pieces. He values curiosity and experimentation and strives to keep those ideals alive within himself and his community.
In 2021, Jacob won a commission from The Guild of Carillonneurs in North America, to write his composition, Fractured Chronology, for Claire Janezic, based on the idea of clock time (as opposed to duration). After the initial premiere at the University of Rochester’s Hopeman Carillon, this composition was featured on the Sunday Afternoon Carillon Recital Series at Riverside Church in NYC, by Dr. Charles Semowich.
Jacob Leibowitz holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Classical Composition from the Manhattan School of Music where he studied under the guidance of Dr. Reiko Fueting and Dr. J. Mark Stambaugh.
Artistic Discipline: Music Composition
Project Vision
When I think of Change as reflected in the Torah, I think of Kohelet/Ecclesiastes, which is an existential and poetic masterpiece reflecting on change and the betterment of oneself and how it truly affects us as humans. Why change when at the end we all die? (Chapter 2 Verse 14) And is there any change that is really new? (Chapter 1 Verse 10) Or if we zoom out to see a wider period of time are we and the events of the world just repeating ourselves? I will work with the text of Kohelet and investigate these themes of change and apparent change through an underscoring of the text for string quartet and narrator. An underscoring allows for this composition to exist equally in the original Hebrew as well as various translations since the composition isn’t reliant on a syllabic setting of the text (like a song would be). In other words, this work is durable and easy to perform for a wide variety of audiences in the language that they will connect to the most.
www.jacobleibowitz.com