composer, organizer, teacher | faculty @ Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University, founder and artistic director @ Evolution Contemporary Music Series & RiseBmore

The works of Jacob Walls trace the vital impacts sonority and gesture make on each other. In music for chamber ensemble, symphony orchestra, and solo instrument, fascinations with particular sounds yield a lyric of their own, and fragile flickers embedded in melody become more integral with each repetition.


Walls studied at Williams College (B.A.), the University of Oregon (M.M., M.A.), and and the University of Pennsylvania (Ph.D.). His music has been presented by SEAMUS, Bowerbird, and the Megalopolis Saxophone Orchestra. Recent works include Frayed, for tenor saxophone and fixed media electronics, recorded by Matthew Levy on XAS Records, Lurking Beyond Thought, for mixed chamber ensemble and voice based on a text by Clarice Lispector, and Tachygenesis, for saxophone quartet. He lives in Philadelphia.

Noah Jenkins is a composer and violinist/violist from Oregon, now living in Chicago. His music is inspired by tuning, field recordings, synthesizers, acoustic phenomena, and experiences of deep sound in deep time.

In 2022 Wild Up premiered Spirits Hover as part of the LA Phil’s Noon to Midnight festival. In 2023 Jenkins developed and premiered After Life (a 40-minute piece with original text for vocalist and ensemble) in Chicago with Après L’Histoire. In 2024 he released Without Persistent Environments (Sawyer Editions), an album of two electroacoustic trombone pieces recorded by Chicago trombonist and composer Riley Leitch. Peter Margasak (Bandcamp) praised the music’s “sustained lines awash in luxurious overtones” and its “focus on the dynamic interaction of sound drifting into eternity.”

In 2025 John Adams will conduct the LA Phil New Music Group in the premiere of Not a dream sound, but a sound which sleeping we had really heard, a work for string orchestra, keyboards, and antiphonal percussion, and ~Nois saxophone quartet and Varo String Quartet will premiere Poetics of Space Translation Symmetry in Chicago.

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