Dr. Jeff Bowen

Instructor of Classical Guitar

DMA University of Washington

BA Stanford University

Jeffrey Bowen is a composer and guitarist originally from St. Louis, Missouri. Jeffrey was awarded a BA in Music from Stanford University, where he studied composition with Jaroslaw Kapuscinski and Mark Applebaum, and classical guitar with Charles Ferguson, giving solo recitals of Bach, Mozart, Giuliani, Turina, and Henze in addition to performing modern and contemporary works with the Stanford New Ensemble. He has given solo performances across the United States and performed in master classes with Sharon Isbin, Ben Verdery, Odair Assad, and Jason Vieaux, among others, and in 2007 was selected to perform for Tali Roth in her public master classes at the National Guitar Workshop in New Milford, Connecticut.

He has written music for a wide array of instrumental ensembles and electronic media, with work featured at the Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music, the University of Nebraska’s 2015 New Music Festival, the New York City Electroacoustic Music festival, and the International Computer Music Conference. His compositional work returns to the guitar on occasion, where it is featured as a solo instrument or, at times, as a guiding presence in larger ensembles. Five Impromptus for Solo Guitar, a fragmentary exploration of diverse guitar styles, was premiered at Stanford’s Music Department Showcase in 2009, and the orchestral work Stalasso—in which the orchestra elaborates the resonances of the solo guitar—was presented in 2013, as a part of the Seattle Symphony’s New Music Works program.

Jeffrey is currently based in Seattle, where he teaches guitar at Seattle University, and is active as a composer and as a classical/electric guitarist, having performed with the Inverted Space Ensemble, Seattle Modern Orchestra, Universal Language Project, Seattle Metropolitan Chamber Orchestra, and as a soloist with the UW Wind Ensemble. He has also been teaching courses in music history and theory at the University of Washington and Cornish College of the Arts, and completed a DMA in composition at the University of Washington under Professor Joël-François Durand.

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