John Aylward's music comprises solo works, chamber music, orchestral work, and music for film and multimedia. He grew up in the Sonoran Desert, on the border of Arizona and Mexico, a child of an immigrant mother from Germany (herself a World War II refugee) and in circumstances of both tremendous diversity and economic instability. His music processes the impacts of that earlier life, filled with a deep sense of community, rich expressions of converging cultural histories, and the otherworldly landscapes of the desert.
Awards and fellowships include those from the John S. Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, the Koussevitzky Commission from the Library of Congress, the Fulbright Foundation, MacDowell, Tanglewood, the Aspen Music Festival, First Prize from the International Society for Contemporary Music, and many others.
At MacDowell in 2007, Aylward completed a setting of Louise Gluck poetry for mezzo-soprano and chamber ensemble that would premiere at Brandeis University later that year. During his 2025 residency, he worked on a new piece for orchestra.
