Michael Jarrell was born in Switzerland in 1958. He began his career studying both the visual arts and music, then decided to focus on composition, which he studied with Eric Gaudibert at the Conservatoire de Genève; he also took part in various composition workshops, notably at Tanglewood in 1979. He then enrolled at the Staatliche Hochschule für Musik of Freiburg im Brisgau, where he studied with Klaus Huber. He held a residency at the Cité des Arts in Paris from 1986 to 1988, studying computer music at IRCAM during this time; he then was a resident at the Villa Médicis in Rome from 1988-1989, and at the Swiss Institute in Rome from 1989-1990. From October 1991 to June 1993, he was composer in residence with the Orchestre de Lyon, and in 1996 at the Lucerne Festival. The March 2000 Musica Nova Festival in Helsinki was dedicated to his work. The following year, in 2001, the Salzbourg Festival commissioned Abschied, a concerto for piano and orchestra. He taught music at the Vienna Hochschule für Musik de Vienne and in 2004 was appointed professor of composition at the Haute école de Musique de Genève.

Jarrell’s compositions are influenced by the art of Giacometti and by Varèse, both of whom returned to the same theme over and over in their work. The composer uses recurring patterns that branch out through his work, as some of the titles of his pieces evoke; for example, Rhizomes, written in 1993. He has maintained a link between composition and visual thinking; his Assonances, for example, are presented as a sketchbook, the first of which, clarinette solo, dates from 1983. The cycle continued for many years, including Assonance IVb for horn, written in 2009, and Staub - Assonance IIIb for video and seven musicians, also from 2009. Congruences (1989), his first major electronic piece, was inspired by geometric notions of planes, perspectives, and figural anamorphosis, projected in temporal form. Although his work can be placed in the tradition of serialism in terms of the discrete creation of the material, the spirit of development and of multi-dimensional formal construction gives Jarrell’s music a certain transparency of texture and highlights his original thinking in terms of notions of figuration and harmonic polarity, all within a formal understanding that is essentially discursive and dramatic.

Two major dramatic works stand out in his career: the opera Cassandre (1994), which integrates the universe of electronic music into the world of the traditional orchestra and Galilei, based on Brecht’s Life of Galileo, a commission from the Grand Théâtre de Genève that premiered in January 2006. Another work of musical theater titled Le père and based on a short story by Heiner Müller, premiered in June 2020 at the Schwetzingen Festival in Germany. In 2018, his opera Bérénice, based on the work of Jean Racine, premiered at the Opéra national de Paris.

Jarrell’s compositions have won numerous prizes, including the Prix Acanthes in 1983, the Marescotti Prize in 1986, the Beethovenpreis of the City of Bonn for Trei II in 1986, the Gaudeamus and Henriette Renié Prizes for Instantanés in 1988, the Siemens-Förderungspreis in 1990, the City of Vienna Music Prize in 2010 and the Swiss Music Prize in 2019. Michael Jarrell was named a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres in 2001.