The MacArthur Award-winning composer and pianist Vijay Iyer has never found a boundary that he hasn’t instinctively attempted to cross.

He is possibly the only jazz pioneer ever to receive a master’s degree in physics from the University of California at Berkeley, or to base some early compositions on a series of numerical equations known as the Fibonacci sequence.

The son of Indian immigrants, Iyer, 53, wrote his dissertation in 1998 on the music of the African diaspora, and now holds a joint appointment at Harvard University in the Department of Music and the Department of African and African American Studies.

Though he is known primarily as a jazz composer that hasn’t stopped Iyer from making extensive forays into classical music, or from collaborating with pioneering visual artists, poets and hip-hop musicians.

It’s in this latter role that Iyer and his frequent performing partner, the Grammy Award-winning violinist Jennifer Koh will perform a concert in Howard County this weekend for Chamber Music Maryland. The program will pair J.S. Bach’s sonatas with Iyer’s compositions.

“Jenny is one of the greatest living interpreters of Bach,” Iyer said, “and she’s also an ardent champion and commissioner of new music by living composers. There is a kind of larger unity that emerges from bringing these different elements together.”

The following interview with Iyer has been edited for clarity and length.

Q: Tell me about the new piece you’ll be performing, a section from “Scenes of Living and Dying.”

A: We’re doing part one, and it’s part of a larger project we’re collaborating on with [the multimedia artist] Carrie Mae Weems, though the videos she is creating won’t be part of the Maryland concert.

It began with a shared experience of grief that happened over the last few years, I lost my father in 2021, and Jenny lost her father two years ago, on New Year’s Eve in 2022.

When my father passed, I got a call from Carrie in which she said things that helped me understand grief differently. She said that when she lost her father, she was so distraught. And then one day, she looked in the mirror and saw his face.

After someone dies, they begin to show up in your life in a new way. It’s the beginning of a new stage in your relationship.

We’ve all lost people to the pandemic, so you start to realize that actually everybody is grieving. Sadly, that is one thing we all have in common.

It’s a fruitful, simple fact to meditate on.

Q: You seem to enjoy connecting disciplines that appear quite different on the surface. I get the idea you wouldn’t respond well to being told, “You can’t do that because …”

A: It sort of naturally happens. It’s not so much that I’m defying anything as that I’m moving towards a larger sense of community that’s not bound by notions of genre or discipline or style.

It’s also more true to how we live, since I don’t find myself limiting my world view to people who do the same thing I do.

I would even go further and say that every collaboration brings something out of you: growth or discovery or a newfound awareness. It’s not so much that you’re working with someone outside your discipline; you’re working with someone outside your body, so they end up having a different sense of the world than you do.

Q: Does jazz express one part of your personality, and classical music another?

A: The prevailing view in the classical world is for there to be a separation between composer and performer. You have these incredible performers who only interpret music written by someone else. If you asked them to make their own music, they might find themselves at a loss. Their entire life is dedicated to refining other people’s ideas.

The difference between composing and performing is the difference between reaching deep inside yourself for your ideas, versus reaching deep inside yourself for your feelings. It’s the difference between great stand-up comics like Richard Pryor and great actors.

When people make this comparison between so-called jazz and so-called classical, they’re focusing on the playing. To me, that is not the right place to look for similarities and differences. All playing feels the same.

That first struck me when I wrote a piano quintet and performed it with the Brentano Quartet. They were so in the moment with sound that playing with them felt alive. It’s was as though we were all alive in the music together.

Q: Is math still part of your composing process?

A: Not any more than it is for anyone else. I quit physics 30 years ago. But whenever you make anything — a cake or drink or composition – you have to think about proportion and balance, form and shape. Every discipline has some sense of precision.

For me, math and music are both very architectural. You’re composing a space, but it’s made up of durations and pitches that have to be measured. Then it becomes interesting to think about proportions and relations and intervals.

But, I never wanted to be the music and math guy. It kind of got pinned on me. It can lead people to ignore the emotional truth of who I am.

Q: You’re an Indian man who is a professor of African studies. Have you ever received pushback for crossing racial lines or cultural appropriation?

A: No, not really. Let me put this way: My approach is through collaborating with other artists. That’s been my MO [operating method] throughout my entire time of making music in the world. When you build community with fellow artists, that makes it basically unassailable, because you cannot say that what we do is inauthentic expression.

You don’t have to like it, but you can’t say that it doesn’t belong on the planet.

Have a news tip? Contact Mary Carole McCauley at mmccauley@baltsun.com, 1410332-6704 and x.com/@mcmccauley.

If You Go

Vijay Iyer and Jennifer Koh will perform at 4 p.m. Sunday at Howard Community College’s Smith Theater, 10901 Little Patuxent Pkwy, Columbia. Tickets cost $47.50 and can be bought at chambermusicmaryland.org.