Alumnus Wins Grammy Award

Steven Mackey

Stony Brook University alum Steven Mackey, MA Music 1980, won a Grammy Award on February 12, for his most recent CD, Lonely Motel: Music from Slide, in the Best Small Ensemble Performance-Classical category.

Mackey’s first musical passion was playing electric guitar in rock bands in northern California. He later discovered concert music and has composed for orchestras, chamber ensembles, dance and opera. Since the mid 1980s he has resumed his interest in the electric guitar and regularly performs his own work, including two concertos as well as numerous solo and chamber works.

Mackey is a professor of music and chair of the Department of Music at Princeton University, where he has been a faculty member since 1985. He teaches composition, theory, 20th-century music, improvisation and a variety of special topics. He regularly coaches and conducts new work by student composers as well as 20th-century classics. Mackey was the recipient of Princeton University’s first Distinguished Teaching Award in 1991.