Jeffrey Means

The American conductor Jeffrey Means studied percussion and conducting at the New England Conservatory in Boston, which honored him with the John Cage Award and the Tourjee Alumni Award and, when he graduated, the Gunther Schuller Medal. He was a Fellow of the Tanglewood Music Center in 2005. Over the past year, he also acquired significant experiences serving as assistant conductor at the Spoleto Festival and at the LUCERNE FESTIVAL ACADEMY, where he collaborated with such conductors as Alan Gilbert, John Kennedy, Susanna Mälkki, and Matthias Pintscher. Means specializes in contemporary music. He is the conductor and artistic director of the ensemble Sound Icon, and his interpretation of Georg Friedrich Haas’s in vain was listed by the Boston Globe as one of the “best contemporary music performances” of 2012. He has moreover conducted many other ensembles in Boston and New York, including the Firebird, Ludovico, and East Coast Contemporary Ensembles; the Callithumpian Consort; Dinosaur Annex; the Talea and Mimesis Ensembles; and the Da Capo Chamber Players. Other engagements have taken him to Finland (the Piano Espoo Festival); France (the Etchings Festival); the Composit New Music Festival in Rieti, Italy; the Fundación Música AntiquaNova in Buenos Aires; and numerous American festivals. Jeffrey Means has worked with such composers as Pierluigi Billone, Pierre Boulez, Jonathan Harvey, Helmut Lachenmann, Tristan Murail, Steve Reich, and Salvatore Sciarrino, conducting multiple American premieres of their works. He is a member of the Conducting Faculty at the Berklee College of Music and taught over the past academic year at the New England Conservatory and the Boston Conservatory as well.

August 2017