30/05/2025
what do heavy metal guitar, driving marching band percussion, ancient Jewish liturgical songs, and cutting-edge contemporary classical music have in common? They come together in the mind and music of Asher Lurie, a newly graduated composition student from the Frost School of Music.
“The music that resonates with me is music that makes me want to jump up and down and dance, but not necessarily in a conventional way,” said Lurie, who starts a master’s program at the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University on full scholarship this fall, one of just three students accepted out of approximately 200 applicants. “Music that keeps me guessing, but there’s a groove to it that’s repetitive, almost aggressive. I found that same aggression and groove in certain contemporary classical music. I’ve always wanted to translate that to an audience, but with peaks and valleys, so it has an arc.”
Lurie is one of the Frost School composition program’s most promising graduates. He chose Shepherd after being accepted at multiple elite music institutions, including the Mannes School of Music, the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University, the Peabody Institute, and the Eastman School of Music, receiving multiple scholarship offers. His percussion quartet “CORE” won first prize in the prestigious Tribeca New Music 2025 Young Composer Competition for composers age 21 and under; and he was a finalist for the American Prize in Composition (orchestra music, college/university division). Lurie also won the inaugural contest to compose a work for the Frost All-Stamps Ensemble’s annual concert in March, which this year included famed genre-bending classical string trio Time For Three.
Composition lecturer Donald Scott Stinson, who has worked closely with Lurie, said he is exceptionally motivated and talented.
“He is incredibly driven and focused,” said Stinson, noting that he’s exchanged 646 emails with Lurie in the past two years. “This also shows in his music. It isn’t just a question of him coming from the percussion world or the world of rock and metal music – what high schooler in America doesn’t? But he can translate all of that directly into his music in an authentic and starkly powerful way.”
Raised in Dallas, Texas, Lurie, who is Jewish, loved singing Jewish prayers as a little boy. He persuaded his parents to give him a guitar and lessons when he was eight, and soon wrote his first song, “Eat the Pizza.” His teacher, Mick Cervino, was an accomplished hard rock bassist who played with Yngwie Malmsteen and Deep Purple guitarist Ritchie Blackmore. When Lurie moved from a tiny Jewish day school to a big public high school, he joined the marching band and practiced snare drum four to five hours a day, becoming first chair in its top marching band by sophomore year.
During the pandemic, Lurie began creating music for marching and wind bands on a laptop and became fascinated by composition. “It was seeing what that music could do for an audience, what it could do for me, how excited it could make me and an audience,” Lurie said. “I could write for any instrument and make it do anything. I learned that a lot of what I wanted to do was impossible. But doing so many things with so many instruments was very entertaining and exciting.”
His early love of Jewish ritual music continues to run through his own. “Being exposed to so much music with sounds that are different from Western classical or pop music had a big influence on the melodies, tonalities, and harmonies of my music,” he said.
Lurie was drawn to the Frost School by the chance to study multiple genres; he also played in the Frost Band of the Hour and minored in business. He studied with renowned composers-in-residence Mathias Pintscher, Chen Yi, and Marcos Balter, and was inspired by contemporary composers Andy Akiho, David Lang, and Beat Furrer. “I was shown a wide world of music I had no idea existed,” said Lurie. “It put a lot of sounds in my head.”
Private lessons with Stinson helped him put those sounds together. “It was an opportunity to take everything I’ve been exposed to, figure out what I want from my music, filter out what I’m attached to in my musical history, and find my compositional voice,” Lurie said.
Stinson says Lurie’s capacity to listen widely and intently, analyze what he hears, and apply it to his own compositions has helped him grow enormously. “Lately, Asher has gotten pretty scary, as every work he has brought in has been jaw-droppingly impressive and seemingly a real advance on his previous work,” Stinson said. “Asher is relentless in his pursuit of that excellence.”
