A guitarist himself, Steven Mackey is one of the few composers to write for the electric guitar in a classical context. He is also a noted educator.

Mackey was born to American parents in Frankfurt, West Germany, on February 14, 1956. As a teen, he played rock guitar, and rock and blues continued to influence his music later on, but when he was 19, he heard the String Quartet No. 16 in F major, Op. 135, of Beethoven on a car radio, specifically the unusual unison E flat in the second movement, and at that moment, he decided to become a composer. Mackey attended the University of California at Davis as an undergraduate, earning summa cum laude honors. He went on for a master's at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and a PhD at Brandeis University. Soon after completing his education, Mackey joined the faculty at Princeton University, where he remains as of the early 2020s. After appearing as a guitarist on several albums by others, he released his debut, Lost Found, on the Bridge label in 1996. He has both issued albums under his own name and seen his compositions, not all of which involve the electric guitar, performed by others.

Mackey has received some of the most prestigious awards in American classical music, including a Guggenheim fellowship, a Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and two awards from the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, among others. He has performed as an electric guitar soloist with such groups as the Arditti Quartet, the Kronos Quartet, and the New World Symphony. He has held several composer-in-residence posts at the Tanglewood Music Festival, the Aspen Music Festival, and other events. Among his notable compositions are Troubadour Songs for string quartet and electric guitar (1991), Dreamhouse for solo tenor, vocal quartet, electric guitar quartet and orchestra (2003), which earned several Grammy award nominations, and A Beautiful Passing for violin and orchestra (2008), which commemorated his mother's death. He has written several operas and has remained active into the early 2020s with such works as the Concerto for Curved Space, premiered in 2022 by the Boston Symphony Orchestra under conductor Andris Nelsons, and RIOT, whose premiere featured the composer himself on electric guitar, mezzo-soprano Alicia Olatuja, the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra, the Princeton University Glee Club, and conductor Xian Zhang. Mackey serves as co-director of the Princeton Composers' Ensemble and earned that school's distinguished teaching award. In 2022, he joined the faculty of the Curtis Institute of Music as well. ~ James Manheim, Rovi