Aaron Nichols (he/him, 2003) is a composer and cellist from New York City whose creative output includes concert, electronic, and film music. Compelled both by his admiration of traditional classical and jazz formal rhetoric, and his desire to undermine it, his works tend to find cracks within genres, find twists in stylistic tropes, and juxtapose stylistic elements. As such, they often explore the surreal, the absurd, and the uncanny.

Aaron’s music is very often loosely programmatic, with music built usually around the mimicry of either natural phenomena or sensory experiences, or drawing inspiration from stories and the media of telling them. Examples of the former include his composition “On a Scale of 1-10” for cello and electric guitar, which attempts to describe the gradual numbing and alteration of physical pain,“Overstimulations” for strings, percussion, and live electronics, which describes different states of overstimulation, largely based on his own experience as an autistic person placed in uncomfortable environments, or his saxophone quartet “Mesovortex,” which is built both around the concept of tornadogenesis, and the unsettling experience of being in a tornado warning; examples of the latter include his recent violin concerto “Towards Utnapishtim,” inspired by Gilgamesh’s search for that character in order to cheat death, and “And Still the Steeples Hum,” inspired by A.E. Housman’s poem “Bredon Hill,” and Ralph Vaughan-Williams’s setting of it. He has written scores to several student films and documentaries, as well as notable silent films such as Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov) and Metropolis (Fritz Lang).

Aaron’s works “Mesovortex” and “And Still the Steeples Hum” have seen recent premieres by PRISM Quartet and Unheard-of Ensemble respectively, and his work has seen further readings by the Manhattan Brass Quintet, the Mivos Quartet, the Bergamot Quartet, Mantra Percussion, and members of the International Contemporary Ensemble and American Composers Orchestra, among others. He was among the winners of the Morton Gould Young Composer Awards in 2026, and has received first prize in the Ensemble Ibis Competition for student composers, commissioned by the MATA Jr. festival, and two distinctive mentions by the Robert Avalon composition competition.

Aaron Nichols completed his bachelor’s degree in music composition (with a minor in TIMARA) at Oberlin Conservatory, studying privately under professors Stephen Hartke, Jesse Jones, and Steven Kemper, and will begin his Masters’ at the Shepherd School at Rice University in the fall of 2026.