About

Aidan Vass (b. 2003) is an American composer. His music has been performed in venues such as Miami’s New World Center and the Walt Disney Concert Hall.

Aidan Vass (b. 2003) is a composer of contemporary classical music. He was a composer fellow with the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Nancy and Barry M. Sander’s Fellowship Program from 2018-2021, where he had the honor of studying under Andrew Norman, Sarah Gibson and Thomas Kotcheff. As a fellow, he composed music for ensembles such as the American Youth Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic, members of the Los Angeles Master Chorale and the USC Thornton Edge ensemble, among others.

Vass studied classical composition primarily with Brett Banducci for 6 years until 2021. He has participated in the Sunset Chamberfest’s Young Composer’s Workshop 2018, 2019 and 2020 seasons and was accepted into Curtis’ 2019 Summer Composition program as well as the Boston University Tanglewood Institute Summer 2020 program. In 2019, he was a finalist in the Young Composers Challenge and was named a 2020, 2021, & 2022 winner from the YoungArts Foundation. He was also a first place recipient of the MTAC Young Composers State Contest and a finalist for the ASCAP Morton Gould Award.

In 2019, Vass began to incorporate multi-media elements into his compositional practice, which led to the release of 2019’s Abounding Ideas, a piece for electric piano synced with a 3D animation, and 2020’s Gray Tree, a cello piece/2D animation drawn from the work of the same name by Piet Mondrian. His ambitious independent catalogue led to the release of his debut album 8 Sketches for Piano, a 30-minute work for solo piano paired with 5 interpretive music videos. He is currently working on an expansive string quartet project to follow up his debut.

As an active choral composer as well, Vass is published with both Santa Barbara Music Publishing and Hal Leonard. His choral music was also featured on Seraphour’s debut album and has since seen radio play all over the nation.

His music has also been featured on several online publications, such as The Violin Channel, Planet Hugill, Palaver Arts Magazine, VoyageLA, OpusLA, and more.

Vass is currently studying composition at the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music.