Craig Peaslee Music
Craig Peaslee
Craig Peaslee is a composer, arranger, educator, scholar, and guitarist whose music explores the hybridization of American jazz and Western classical traditions. He holds a Doctor of Musical Arts in Composition from the University of Miami's Frost School of Music (2025), where he currently serves as Lecturer of Theory and Composition. His dissertation, Heaven, Hell and the Blues for jazz orchestra, exemplifies his approach to fusing jazz and classical languages.
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Craig began his musical journey mastering rock guitar but quickly found his purpose in finger-style guitar performance and composing for jazz ensembles and the concert stage. This background – rooted in rock, blues, and jazz aesthetics – shapes his compositional voice. His harmonic, rhythmic, and technical explorations fuse disparate genres into the liminal space between idioms and cultures.
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As a Marine Corps veteran, questions of service and consequence run through works like Rescue Me, examining the Afghanistan War, and Fragile (The American Prize, 2022), addressing systemic inequality, climate change, and other pressing sociopolitical issues. These works confront difficult subjects in musical terms, inviting listeners to think critically about their communities, culture, and society - and their role within them. Other pieces explore different territory: Second City Strut, winner of the Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra Competition (2021), hybridizes classical and jazz languages; Her Dress Waves treats spatialization as a primary compositional parameter; and The Message derives its thematic material from musical cryptograms.
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Electroacoustic techniques are central to Craig's practice. Fragile integrates fixed media with live brass quintet; MIA - Media Informs America is an electronic work; and The Death of a Nation combines electronics with string quartet. He works in Logic Pro for production and mixing, employs spatial audio techniques, and incorporates processed recordings into his compositions. This fluency informs both his creative work and his teaching – he helps students develop practical skills in DAWs, notation software, and virtual orchestration.
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Beyond the concert hall, Craig values lasting relationships with collaborators. For seven years, he founded and directed The Moonlighter's Orchestra, an eight-piece jazz ensemble in Milwaukee – writing and arranging over one hundred charts, booking performances, managing personnel, and building an ensemble that could workshop new material regularly. He is a member of ASCAP, the Society of Composers, Inc., and the International Society of Jazz Arrangers and Composers. His music is available on PARMA/Navona, Common Tone Records, and PHASMA Music.
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Craig's music has been performed by the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra, Henry Mancini Institute Orchestra, Arcadian Winds, Flight 5-8-4 Big Band, and many more. His work has been selected for conferences and festivals hosted by the Society of Composers, Inc., College Music Society, National Association of Composers/USA, International Society of Jazz Arrangers and Composers, and the New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival. He has received funding from the Presser Foundation, Illinois Arts Council, Kohler Foundation, Shay Foundation, ARTZenter, and others in competitive grants supporting projects including the albums And Justice For... and Windswept.
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Craig's scholarly work examines how theory can serve broader audiences. His SMT-Pod episode, Reimagining Music Analysis: A Radio Broadcast of Johanna Beyer's Music of the Spheres, models rigorous analysis in an accessible format – he recorded, edited, mixed, and performed vocal talent for the peer-reviewed publication. He has presented papers and posters at conferences hosted by the Society of Composers, Inc., College Music Society, International Society of Jazz Arrangers and Composers, and the Academy of Science, Engineering, and Medicine of Florida. His research interests include Public Music Theory, the intersection of jazz and classical analytical traditions, cymatics, and how composers encode meaning in musical structures.
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Growing up in a rural community shapes Craig's approach to both composition and teaching. He believes new music should be accessible without sacrificing artistic ambition. This same principle guides his pedagogy. His approach to Public Music Theory makes rigorous concepts accessible to students regardless of background, just as his compositions aim to reach audiences unfamiliar with contemporary concert music. Whether composing, teaching, or performing, he meets people where they are.