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Best news first: Gill’s [Before the Wresting] Tides uses a large canvas and gives chorus, orchestra, and virtuoso pianist much to do as the music leaps out in many directions, its burgeoning sense of invention prompted by Hart Crane’s restlessly morphing imagery in the poem “Voyages II”…exhilarating indeed…the ending is a stunner.

His music, judging by this selection, is grand, serious in mood…[Helian] is a work of considerable intensity.

Jeremy Gill is a comer in the world of new music. He is, like the best of his contemporaries, unconcerned with stylistic battles concerning things like tonality, historicism, or audience pandering. He uses whatever tools are available and useful, and has managed to find his own voice. It is one well worth listening to.

Mark Laubach’s recital at Pine Street Presbyterian Church included the commissioned work by Jeremy Gill, 8 Variations and Toccata on “Betzet Yisrael” in all its onomatopoeic splendor with trembling earth, mountains skipping like rams, and rocks turned into a fountain of waters! The 83-rank Skinner/Möller was more than equal to this challenge, as was Canon Laubach.

Jeremy Gill’s music is particularly concerned with sound qualities, to the extent that he’ll move his performers to different parts of the hall during the course of a work, as was the case in the Philadelphia premiere of his 2009 work Soglie, Serenate, Sfere, for oboe and two percussionists…this shift also altered the music’s emotional shape—pulling the sound away, creating a distance of not just space but time, as Gill evoked ancient, even primeval impulses. I’ve heard Gill make similar broadly cultural and ritualistic allusions in earlier works. It seems to be a signature for this promising young composer.

Jeremy Gill has imagination, and his music is well worth hearing, reading about, and investigating.

Gill writes with precision and care, intriguing imagination, and a fearless emotional depth…His earthy, even primitive sounds seem to link one of mankind’s earliest civilizations as much to our animal essence as to our apparent sophistication.

More daringly terse was Jeremy Gill’s superb Eliot Fragments, whose episodes jumped off from T.S. Eliot quotations to create stark, explosive sound pictures that went to extremes within seconds.