Joshua Fineberg
Joshua Fineberg (born July 26, 1969) is an American composer of contemporary classical music. He was born in Boston and began studying music at age five.
He studied at the Peabody Conservatory with Morris Cotel, winning first prize in the biannual Virginia Carty de Lillo Composition Competition. He worked with leading composers in the United States and France, including George Crumb, Jacob Druckman, Robert Hall Lewis, Philippe Manoury, and André Boucourechliev. In 1991 he moved to Paris to study with Tristan Murail. In 1992 he was chosen by the Ensemble InterContemporain for a course in composition and musical technologies. He returned to the United States in 1997 to pursue a doctorate at Columbia University, which he completed in 1999. After teaching at Columbia for a year, he joined Harvard University as the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities until 2007.
In 2007 he joined the Boston University School of Music and became the director of their electronic music studio. In 2012 he became the founding director of the Boston University Center for New Music. He has collaborated with IRCAM in Paris as a lecturer and as a coordinator for their 1996 summer course. He has also worked with computer scientists and music psychologists to develop tools for computer-assisted composition and for studies of music perception. He has served as artistic director for recordings with performing ensembles and, during the 1999–2000 season, directed Speculum Musicae in New York City and the Columbia Sinfonietta in Boston.
Fineberg edited two issues of the Contemporary Music Review on spectral music and was the journal’s US editor from 2003 to 2009. His works include Recueil de Pierre et de sable for two harps and ensemble, Veils, and Shards. He has collaborated on dance and theater projects, including a project based on Nabokov’s Lolita. A monographic CD of his music by Ensemble Court-Circuit was released in 2002, another CD by Ensemble FA came out in 2009, and a 2012 CD with his complete piano works performed by Marilyn Nonken. A 2018 CD titled Sonic Fictions was released as well.
Major projects include an imaginary opera based on Nabokov’s Lolita for actor, dancers, video, ensemble and electronics; Speaking in Tongues, a concerto for Les Percussions de Strasbourg; Objets trouvé for Court-Circuit; and La Quintina for string quartet with electronics, premiered at the Ultraschall festival in Berlin as a collaboration between the Freiburg ExperimentalStudio and IRCAM. In 2017 the Dal Niente Ensemble and Mocrep premiered his immersive evening of music, take my hand....
Fineberg has received numerous prizes and fellowships, including ASCAP Foundation Grants, an Ars Electronica special jury mention, the Rapoport Prize in Composition, the Arnold Salop Composition Competition, the Palache Scholarship, ASCAP Awards (1991–1994), and the Randolph S. Rothschild Award in Composition. In 2011 he was named an artist fellow by the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and in 2016 France named him a Chevalier of Arts and Letters. In 1992 his orchestral work Origins was selected as a Gaudeamus International Composers Award finalist and premiered by the Radio Symfonie Orkest during Gaudeamus Music Week.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 17:15 (CET).