About

Feel free to contact me about commissions, collaborations, scores, arrangements, copying, sauerkraut fermenting techniques, and anything else at:

merzjp(at)gmail.com 

JP Merz is a Los Angeles/DC-based composer, sound artist, and educator. His work, both instrumental and electronic, interrogates the materiality of sound through experimental uses of technology—from networked algorithms to spectral analysis to AI. Centering environmental and social justice, his recent projects have reflected on systemic violence, investigating mass shootings, the climate crisis, and biodiversity loss. 

Merz's music has been performed by yMusic, Altius Quartet, Playground Ensemble, Sound of Ceres, and the Colorado Music Festival Orchestra, as well as by members of Wild Up and the Colorado Symphony Orchestra. His work has been featured by and played in Carnegie Hall, New Music Gathering, San Francisco Fringe Festival, the Abrons Arts Center, ACRE gallery, VICE’s Creator’s Project, Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, and I Care if You Listen.

He is a recipient of New Music USA’s Creator Development Fund, the ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composers Award, the American Composers Forum’s JFund for New Music, and the ASCAP Leonard Bernstein Award, as well as special distinction for the Rudolf Nissim Prize. As he often works across disciplines, his collaborators include dancers, engineers, researchers, algorithms, and robots. Currently, Merz Is Visiting Assistant Professor in Composition and Music theory at American University and holds a doctorate in composition from the University of Southern California (USC)

photo by Owen Zhou