I’m a music historian, composer, and educator.

I’m currently at Stanford University pursuing a PhD in Musicology, previously of The Juilliard School (DMA, MM, BM in Composition). This website includes details about my research interests, selected compositions, teaching background, and various writings and projects. You can find a formal biography below.

Biography

Simon Frisch is an American musicologist and composer currently based in Palo Alto, California. He is pursuing a PhD in Musicology at Stanford University, where his primary research concerns music and sound in courtly and contested civic-religious spaces of late medieval to early modern France. His work has been supported by awards including a 2021–22 Fulbright Advanced Research and Harriet Hale Woolley joint fellowship, as a resident researcher and composer at the Conservatoire de Paris and the Fondation des États-Unis. Recent projects include a reconstruction of Jean Richafort’s motet Consolator captivorum from fragmentary sources presented by Cut Circle and Stanford’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics, performed in a virtual historical acoustic environment courtesy of VALSOUNDS.

Increasingly active as a scholar, Simon has presented invited lectures at the Centre d’études supérieures de la Renaissance (Tours), Columbia Global Centers in Paris, and The Juilliard School’s Doctoral Forum, among others, and has been featured on Radio France. He was awarded the 2023 Richard F. French Dissertation Prize at Juilliard, where he earned a doctorate in composition. His compositions have been performed internationally, including premieres at Alice Tully Hall and engagements with ensembles such as The New Consort and the New Juilliard Ensemble. Commissions include Fais doncq ung chant/Requiem for The New Consort, commemorating Josquin des Prez at 500; the New York, Latvian, and Portuguese recital premieres of marginalia ii by pianist by Robert Fleitz; The Body Untied for soloists and baroque chamber orchestra, presented in New York City by Amanda+James, BZH NY, Région Bretagne, lightbox, and others; and Sandglass Vespers for chamber orchestra by the New Juilliard Ensemble.

As a cultural advocate, Simon organized acclaimed (Le Telegramme, Ouest France, Bretagne Actuelle) summer chamber music concerts in the Ille-et-Vilaine/Côtes-d’Armor regions of Brittany in collaboration with local communities and non-profits as a founder of Festival Daniou, between 2014 and 2018. His work has been profiled in print and broadcast by Choir & Organ magazine, Bretagne Actuelle, French Morning, and Tébéo. In addition to extensive undergraduate teaching, he was a longtime composition faculty member of the Music Advancement Program at The Juilliard School.

Simon received the 2017 Brian M. Israel Prize from the Society for New Music, a 2012 ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composers award, and was winner of the 2015 New Juilliard Ensemble commissioning competition. A sometime performer, Simon has appeared internationally with Cut Circle under Jesse Rodin and the Schola de la Sainte-Chapelle under Brigitte Lesne.