James Romig

James Romig is an American composer born August 5, 1971, in Long Beach, California. He was a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Music.[1]

James Romig responds to an increasingly fragmented and accelerated world by creating highly isomorphic works that evolve slowly and reveal themselves gradually. Endeavoring to reflect the fragile intricacy of the natural world, his compositional designs exert influence on both small-scale iteration and large-scale structure, obscuring boundaries between form and content. Critics have described his music as “rapturous, slow-moving beauty” (San Francisco Chronicle[2]), "developing with the naturalness of breathing" (The New Yorker[3]), and “profoundly meditative... haunting” (The Wire[4]). He is a two-time Copland House award recipient[5] and has served as artist-in-residence at numerous national parks including Everglades,[6] Grand Canyon,[7] and Petrified Forest.[8] Recordings have been released by New World Records, Navona, Blue Griffin, and Perspectives of New Music. His scores are published exclusively by Parallax Music Press. Guest-composer visits include the Eastman School of Music, the Cincinnati Conservatory, SUNY Buffalo, Bowling Green State University, and the American Academy in Rome. Romig holds degrees from the University of Iowa (BM, MM) and Rutgers University (PhD). His primary teachers were Charles Wuorinen and Milton Babbitt, both of whom served on his doctoral dissertation committee. He has been on faculty at Western Illinois University since 2002.