Aaron Jay Kernis is winner of the coveted 2012 Nemmers Prize and 2002 Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition, and one of the youngest composers ever awarded the Pulitzer Prize. Since 2003 he has taught composition at the Yale School of Music, where he is Professor (Adjunct) of Composition. Kernis's music is featured prominently on orchestral, chamber, and recital programs worldwide, and he has been commissioned by many of America's foremost performing artists, including sopranos Renee Fleming and Dawn Upshaw, violinists Joshua Bell and Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, and guitarist Sharon Isbin, and by institutions including the New York Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, Minnesota Orchestra, the Los Angeles and Saint Paul chamber orchestras, Walt Disney Company, Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and Rose Center for Earth and Space at the Museum of Natural History in New York. Kernis was awarded the Stoeger Prize from the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Rome Prize, and he received Grammy nominations for Air and his Second Symphony. His music is widely available on CDs, including the labels Naxos, Decca, Koch, Dorian, Phoenix, Virgin Classics, New Albion, Cedille, Nonesuch, Arabesque, and Innova. He served as new music adviser to the Minnesota Orchestra for ten years and is chairman and director of the Minnesota Orchestra Composer Institute. In 2011 he was named to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. This concert is part of a series of free concerts and master classes California Summer Music will present this July at Sonoma State's Green Music Center. Presented by California Summer Music.