A native of Los Angeles, Jeffery Cotton studied composition at California State
University at Northridge with Daniel Kessner, Frank Campo and Aurelio dela
Vega, where Cotton received a Bachelor of Music cum laude in 1983.
Subsequently, as a Fulbright Scholar, he studied with Hans Werner Henze at the
Hochschule für Musik Köln (Cologne), West Germany, and in 1984 accompanied
Henze to New Mexico, where he acted as Henze’s assistant at the Santa Fe
Opera. There Cotton and Henze co-composed the music to Alain
Renais’s film L’amour a mort, which won the Preis der deutschen
Schallplattenkritik.

Henze conducted the world premiere of Cotton’s Abendland at the 1984 Edinburgh
Festival, with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and mezzo-soprano Linda Hirst.
The following year Cotton’s Dance Symfonye for string trio, recorder trio,
viola da gamba trio, harp and prepared piano, was premiered at the Academy of
Music in Cologne. In 1985 Cotton entered the University of Pennsylvania to
study Music Composition and Theory as an Annenberg Fellow. He worked with
George Crumb, Jay Reise, Chinary Ung and Richard Wernick,
and in 1989 he received his Master of Arts and Ph.D.

The New York Youth Symphony commissioned Cotton’s CityMusic I: Berlin and
premiered it at Carnegie Hall in 1988. Andrew Porter in the New Yorker
described this work as "a strange, stark tone poem, imaginatively scored…
dark, romantic, menacing, suddenly charming, exciting." In the winter of 1990
the National Orchestral Association premiered Cotton’s Fantasia (the first
movement of his symphony Poems of Night), also at Carnegie Hall, under the
direction of Jorge Mester. About this work Andrew Porter wrote:
"If the other movements of Poems of Night are as arresting as this, the work
should be billed without delay." And in the spring Dance Symfonye received its
American premiere in Boston, under the direction of Yehudi Wyner.1990 was also
the year in which Cotton received a Guggenheim Fellowship and returned to
Germany, where, as he observed the reunification of the nation from a vantage
point in Berlin, he also began work on a ballet about the construction of the
Wall, based on the myth of Pyramus and Thisbe.

Jeffery Cotton was Composer-in-Residence of St. Luke’s Chamber Ensemble in New
York City from 1992 to 1996. St. Luke’s commissioned and premiered his Quartet
for Low Strings (1992) for two violas, cello and bass; Trio (1993) for
clarinet, cello and harp; Five Runic Songs (1995) for trumpet, horn, bassoon,
violin, cello and bass; and Lydian Sonata (1996) for flute, clarinet and string
quartet. At St. Luke’s Cotton created Second Helpings, a "hosted" series of
contemporary chamber music performances in the ga
lleries of the Guggenheim Museum SoHo. The series, hailed by the New York Times
as "something truly different" and now part of St. Luke’s regular New York
season, showcases second performances of works by emerging composers,
presenting contemporary music in an informal and especially light-hearted
setting.

In 1995 Cotton received a commission from a Meet the Composer/Reader’s Digest
consortium comprised of the Philadelphia Orchestra, Cleveland Orchestra, and
St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, for CityMusic II: New York, a theater piece for
young audiences, for narrator and orchestra. The Cleveland Plain Dealer
describes the work as "an affectionate and humorous urban tone painting." The
work was premiered by the Philadelphia Orchestra in October 1995, and performed
again by the orchestra in February 1996, Wolfgang
Sawallisch conducting and the composer narrating. The work has subsequently
been performed by the Cleveland Orchestra, The St. Louis Symphony, the Detriot
Symphony and the Indianapolis Symphony.

In March 1999 the Boston string orchestra Metamorphosen, under the direction of
Scott Yoo, offered the world premiere of Cotton’s Serenade (1993) for cello and
chamber orchestra (flute, oboe, English horn, clarinet, bassoon, harp, solo
cello, strings). The Boston Globe described the work as "all at once luscious
and logical, elegantly orchestrated with some super fire-and-ice wind chording.
It considerately provided occasions to show what a capable cello soloist - in
this case Alexis Pia Gerlach - could do" And in April 1999, Metamorphosen named Jeffery Cotton as
Composer-in-Residence of the ensemble, starting in the 1999-2000 season.
Cotton’s first new work for Metamorphosen, Lyra, was premiered by the ensemble
on January 15, 2000 in Jordan Hall, Boston. The Boston Globe praised Lyra as a
work that "draws the ear into the mystery of lyric utterance."

Cotton’s most recent work was La Folia, for strings and harp, commissioned by
the Metamorphosen Chamber Orchestra, who premiered the work in Jordan Hall at
the New England Conservatory, Boston, on March 9, 2001. His next work for
Metamorphosen will be Concerto for Strings, scheduled to be premiered on April 20, 2002.