Connor Simpson is a composer based in Rochester, NY. His music has been featured at festivals such as the New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival, soundSCAPE, Divergent Studio, and the Charlotte New Music Festival, and performed by leading ensembles including Mivos Quartet, Hypercube, and Loadbang.

Connor’s music often draws from early music, threading faint traces of Renaissance harmony and polyphony through delicate timbral landscapes. His work engages with the shifting presence of musical allusion which evolves and refracts as each piece unfolds. These echoes bend and reframe, casting familiar murmurs in unexpected light, where meaning and texture drift, and focus over time.

Connor specializes in computer-assisted composition, building musical structures through algorithms, discrete mathematics, and generative design. His creative practice integrates platforms like Python, Max/MSP, and Mathematica to explore new models of form and transformation. As Events Manager for the Electroacoustic Music Studios @ Eastman (EMuSE), he produced and engineered concerts of leading electroacoustic works, managing and engineering multi-channel speaker arrays, live electronics and sound reinforcement. These concerts included works by esteemed composers such as Helmut Lachenmann, Kaija Saariaho, and Mario Davidovsky, and involved deep collaboration with Eastman ensembles including OSSIA and Musica Nova. He previously served as a studio engineer at Penn State, recording sessions for student and professional composers alike.

Connor is also a dedicated educator, offering private lessons in composition and theory, with an emphasis on professional development and artistic identity for emerging composers. At Eastman, he taught labs in electroacoustic music, providing instruction in recording techniques, digital audio workstations, and music technology while guiding students in applying these skills to their own compositions. He also served as Composition Coordinator for Penn State’s Honors Music Institute, where he led group lessons and workshops in composition, orchestration, and music history.

He holds an M.A. in Music Composition from the Eastman School of Music, where he studied with Robert Morris, Carlos Sanchez-Gutiérrez, and Ricardo Zohn-Muldoon, and a B.M. from Penn State University, studying with Baljinder Sekhon and Sarah Genevieve Burghart Rice.