Vijay Iyer
| Vijay Iyer | |
|---|---|
Vijay Iyer performing in 2008
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| Background information | |
| Born |
October 26, 1971 Albany, New York, United States |
| Genres | Jazz |
| Occupation(s) | Musician, composer |
| Instruments | Piano |
| Labels | Asian Improv, Pi, Artists House, Savoy, ACT, ECM |
| Website | www |
Vijay Iyer (born October 26, 1971) is an American jazz pianist, composer, bandleader, producer, electronic musician, and writer based in New York City. He is a 2013 MacArthur Fellow, and became the Franklin D. and Florence Rosenblatt Professor of the Arts at Harvard University in early 2014.
Born in Albany and raised in Fairport, New York, Iyer is the son of Indian Tamil immigrants to the United States. He received 15 years of Western classical training on violin beginning at the age of 3. He began playing the piano by ear in his childhood and is mostly self-taught on that instrument.
After completing an undergraduate degree in mathematics and physics at Yale University, Iyer attended the University of California, Berkeley, initially to pursue a doctorate in physics. Iyer continued to pursue his musical interests, playing in ensembles led by drummers E. W. Wainwright and Donald Bailey. In 1994 he started working with Steve Coleman and George E. Lewis. In 1995, concurrent to his composing, recording and touring activities, he left the Berkeley physics department and assembled an interdisciplinary Ph.D. program in Technology and the Arts, focusing on music cognition. His 1998 dissertation, Microstructures of Feel, Macrostructures of Sound: Embodied Cognition in West African and African-American Musics, applied the dual frameworks of embodied cognition and situated cognition to music. His graduate advisor was music perception and computer music researcher David Wessel, with further guidance from Olly Wilson, George E. Lewis, Donald Glaser, and Erv Hafter.
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