Biographical Information

Short Bio

Aaron Stepp was born in Lexington, Kentucky in 1985. He is from a musical family, and grew up playing trombone in his father's bands and guitar with lots of friends around campfires. In college at the School of Music at the University of Louisville, he began to compose and fell in love. His teachers there, Marc Satterwhite, Anne Marie deZeeuw, and John Gibson, were influential in encouraging him to experiment and develop his voice as a composer. After graduating he studied with Samuel Adler in Berlin, then attended the VCCA, where he met long-time collaborator Rebecca Morgan Frank. He then attended the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University, where he studied with Claude Baker, Jeffery Haas, and John Gibson. He developed a knack for collaboration while there, working with visual artists, choreographers, videographers, and poets during his time there. After Indiana, Aaron taught lots of lessons and wrote music for a variety of educational settings in Scott County, Kentucky. He then completed his PhD at the University of Virginia, where his dissertation included software, music, and poetry. He develops Py2MusicXML, a Python project for prototyping and translating ideas from code to notation. He lives in Charlottesville, VA with his partner, Rachel, who fixes all his code and eats his food.