Gregg Wager

Who is Gregg Wager?

Gregg Wager is an American composer, pianist, and music critic. He studied composition at the University of Southern California and the California Institute of the Arts. His teachers included Morton Subotnick and Morten Lauridsen. His piano teachers included Yuriy Oliynyk, Doris Stevenson, and Chester Swiatkowski. In 1996, he earned a Ph.D. in musicology at the Free University Berlin.

As a critic, he specializes in contemporary classical music and postmodern music. From 1985 to 1991, he contributed regularly to the Los Angeles Times. In an article for the New York Times, "Going the Way of the Victrola," Wager became an important early advocate of the P2P community and the fall of the importance of the recording studio.

Wager's musical influences vary from traditional forms of American and classical music to minimalism, jazz, rock music, and even serialism. He especially draws influence from Karlheinz Stockhausen and the relationships between pitch and tempo, timbre and rhythm.