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 examined that materiality as it relates to systemic violence, including mass shootings, the climate crisis, and biodiversity loss. Upcoming projects include Khazic Songs, an evening-length work reflecting on displacement, resilience, and cultural continuity through a mostly-forgotten Armenian music notation system called khaz, with support from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation's արդ եւս|in view grant.

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. As he often works across disciplines, his collaborators include dancers, engineers, researchers, algorithms, and robots. In 2025, his work "balance piece" was released as the first single off of An unbalanced piece of wood, an album by cellist Nina Vanhoenacker (Belgium) on Protomaterial Records. 

Merz 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. He is currently a professor of composition and music theory at American University and holds a doctorate in composition from the University of Southern California (USC).