Scott Routenberg
Associate Professor of Music Performance (Jazz Piano)
Dr. Scott Routenberg enjoys a versatile and prolific career as an award-winning composer, arranger, jazz pianist and educator. For over two decades, Routenberg's music has garnered widespread critical acclaim, with JAZZIZ hailing the artist as a "rising-star pianist" who has "found his own voice in the modern mainstream."
In 2004, Scott was the first jazz songwriter to win the coveted John Lennon Songwriting Contest Maxell Song of the Year. Other notable awards and honors include The ASCAP Foundation/Symphonic Jazz Orchestra Commissioning Prize (2016), the International Society of Jazz Arrangers and Composers Symposium SONIC Award for Best Arrangement (2017), Composer Scholar at the Henry Mancini Institute in Los Angeles, the ASCAP Foundation Young Jazz Composer Award (three-time winner), participant in the ASCAP Television and Film Scoring Workshop in L.A. where he received the ASCAP David Rose Scholarship and the DownBeat Student Award for Best Extended Length Composition.
Routenberg is an established symphonic jazz arranger with commissions from Grammy-winning ensembles and artists like the Dutch Metropole Orkest and Howard Levy. His original works and Pops arrangements have been commissioned and premiered by the Symphonic Jazz Orchestra, the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, the Houston Symphony Orchestra and the New York Youth Symphony, among many other fine ensembles. World premieres include Canada, Austria, Romania, Ukraine, the Netherlands, Poland, Norway, China, Russia, Singapore, Thailand, and domestic premieres include Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center. Routenberg was a featured arranger on Jeremy Monteiro's album "Tapestry Live" (2024), Singapore's first symphonic jazz album. In 2025, Routenberg was commissioned to co-orchestrate and engrave Howard Levy's monumental Eastern European Harmonica and Piano Concerto for Single Soloist from the composer's handwritten score.
Routenberg has performed with internationally renowned jazz musicians the likes of Howard Levy, Miguel Zenón, Wycliffe Gordon, Steve Davis, Ryan Keberle, John Fedchock, Christian Howes, and Alexis Cole, and has opened for jazz guitar legend John Scofield. Jazz festival and club performances include the Montreux Jazz Festival, Jazz à Vienne, the North Sea Jazz Festival, Indy Jazz Fest, Elkhart Jazz Fest, the Gainesville Jazz Festival, The Green Mill (Chicago), The Jazz Kitchen (Indianapolis), The Velvet Note (Atlanta), Rudy's Jazz Room (Nashville), The Home Smith Bar at the Old Mill (Toronto, Canada), The Palladium (Carmel, IN), and the Schrott Center for the Arts (Indianapolis).
The Scott Routenberg Trio's debut album on Summit Records, Every End is a Beginning (2017), reached #65 on the JazzWeek radio chart, #33 on the Roots Music Report Top 50 Jazz Albums, and was named Jazz Album of the Week by soulandjazz.com. The Creative Source's Dr. Brad Stone hailed the album as "an early candidate for jazz record of the year." The trio's sophomore album SUPERMOON (2018, Summit Records) received critical praise as "a work of unified expression from a charismatic trio...with substantial moments of gratification" (Jazz Trail). Jazz Weekly described the album as "a decalogue of Routenberg's compositions...rich in lyricism," declaring that "the modern jazz piano trio is alive and well." SUPERMOON received wide airplay on dozens of jazz stations nationwide and abroad. Praised as "a fine display of the power of the mind" and an "unforgettable studio production," [INSIDE] (2020, Summit Records) is a genre-bending, pandemic-inspired home studio album recorded during quarantine that explores the artist's electro-acoustic nu jazz roots. In 2024 Routenberg founded his own record label, Chroma Note Records. Chroma Note's first release was "Headwinds (2024)," a streaming release that featured Routenberg's three-movement jazz wind quintet.
Routenberg's film credits on IMDB.com include director Peter Krygowski's award-winning film noir short "The Joes" (2021), which premiered at the Culver City Film Festival in Los Angeles. In 2007 Routenberg was commissioned by game developer Day 1 Studios and Lucas Arts to write demo music for the video game Fracture (PS3/XBox360).
Routenberg served twice on the jury for the prestigious American Pianists Association Jazz Piano Competition Premiere Series, where he helped choose the $200,000 Cole Porter Fellowship winners Emmet Cohen and Isaiah J. Thompson (the largest jazz prize in the world).
Dr. Routenberg is tenured Associate Professor of Jazz Piano at Ball State University School of Music, where he has taught since 2012. In 2018 Dr. Routenberg received the College of Fine Arts Dean's Creative Endeavor Award for the School of Music. Pianists in Dr. Routenberg's studio have performed at the Montreux Jazz Festival and Dizzy's Club at Lincoln Center and have won awards and scholarships including the DownBeat Student Music Awards, the Tom Shah Memorial Jazz Scholarship, and the Ball State University Presidential Scholarship. Graduates of the jazz piano studio have cultivated careers as performers and educators, from university jazz piano faculty to featured performers at jazz festivals like Elkhart Jazz Fest and Carmel Jazz Fest. Dr. Routenberg's jazz improvisation students have recently gone on to receive full scholarships and graduate assistantships at universities such as Indiana University Jacobs School of Music and the University of Denver Lamont School of Music.
Routenberg teaches applied jazz piano and improvisation lessons to both undergraduate and graduate students, Jazz Improvisation 1 & 2, Jazz History (online and in-person), Jazz Composition, Jazz Piano Lab, and directs two jazz combos. Since 2023 Routenberg has taught film, television, and video game scoring in the Music Media Production program's Commercial Music Design sequence, where students have the opportunity to score and record a film cue with the Ball State Symphony Orchestra, score student directors' short films, and write adaptive music for modern games. Routenberg's media writing students have scored short films for the Indy Shorts International Film Festival and composed game music for student-designed indie games.
In 2019 Routenberg judged the International Society of Jazz Arrangers and Composers Symposium Student/Young Artist Masterclass Workshops, the Student SONIC Award winner, and the Owen Prize for best big band composition. Dr. Routenberg has presented masterclasses at Berklee College of Music, the University of Northern Colorado, the University of Miami Frost School of Music, the University of South Florida, Coastal Carolina University, Belmont University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Eastern Washington University. Before teaching at Ball State, Dr. Routenberg served as jazz faculty at the University of South Florida and Miami-Dade College.
Routenberg is a graduate and Featured Studio Music and Jazz Alumnus of the University of Miami Frost School of Music, where he received a Doctor of Musical Arts degree in Jazz Composition (2008), a Master of Music degree in Media Writing and Production (2005), and a Master of Music degree in Jazz Piano (2003). He is also an alumnus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he earned a BA in Music and Communications (2001) and was inducted into the national Phi Beta Kappa Society.
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