Aaron Helgeson

Composer Aaron Helgeson uses transcription, adaptation, and collage to mix contemporary sounds with historical sources like wax cylinders, medieval psalms, and unfinished manuscripts. His choral cycle The Book of Never for four-time Grammy Award winning chorus The Crossing received a 2024 American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, and collages ancient hymns from the Novgorod Codex (a medieval book of Kyivan Rus psalm chant overwritten hundreds of times with heretical sermons by an excommunicated Pagan missionary) with contemporary texts by writers in various states of exile. In 2016 he received an Ohio Arts Council Award for his Snow Requiem, an "anti-cantata" based on author David Laskin’s book The Children’s Blizzard about the Homestead-era snowstorm of the same name combining original transcriptions of Norwegian-American immigrant folk music with sonifications of weather data using orchestral tone clusters, wordless vocal chorales, and percussive noise. Other recent projects include Poems of Sheer Nothingness commissioned by soprano Susan Narucki using fragmented realizations of ancient Occitan troubadour poems, Calls of Close and Away for Imani Winds on 19th-century French hunting calls and 20th-century American military signals, and Echoes of Always for Ensemble Dal Niente assembled from scraps of Baroque opera overtures and bits of Helgeson's own previous music.