SHORT BIOGRAPHY

Annie Gosfield is a New York-based composer dubbed "a one woman Hadron collider” by the BBC, and "a master of musical feedback" by the New York Times. Gosfield has created site-specific work for factories, researched jammed radio signals, and composed opera, chamber, and orchestral music. Recent projects include the multi-site opera War of the Worlds with Yuval Sharon, Sigourney Weaver, and the L.A. Philharmonic; a song cycle adapted from the opera, titled The Secret Life of Planets: Heavenly Bodies and Earthly Gossip premiered by the LA Phil; Detroit Industry, a large-scale chamber work inspired by and performed under Diego Rivera’s murals; and a residency sponsored by the League of American Orchestras.

Annie's music is often inspired by the inherent beauty of found sounds, noise, and machinery. The New York Times wrote "Ms. Gosfield’s choice of sounds — which on this occasion included radio static, the signals transmitted by the Soviet satellite Sputnik I, and recordings of Hurricane Sandy — are never a mere gimmick. Her extraordinary command of texture and timbre means that whether she is working with a solo cello or with the ensemble she calls her 21st-century avant noisy dream band, she is able to conjure up a palette of saturated and heady hues." Annie works closely with some of new music’s finest interpreters, and performs with her own group, mixing electronics with acoustic and electric instruments.

Gosfield has received awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, The Academy of Arts and Letters, the American Academy in Rome, the American Academy in Berlin, and The Foundation for Contemporary Arts. Annie has four ambitious portrait albums on the Tzadik label, which feature music that ranges from a chamber cello concerto, to EWA7, an industrial-inspired concert-length piece for her band. Gosfield was a visiting lecturer at Columbia University from 2109-2021, and has taught composition at Princeton University, CalArts, UT Austin, Indiana University, and held the Milhaud Chair of composition at Mills College in 2003 and 2005.

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Annie Gosfield, whom the BBC called "A one woman Hadron collider" lives in New York City and works on the boundaries between notated and improvised music, electronic and acoustic sounds, refined timbres and noise. She composes for others and performs with her own group, taking her music on a path through festivals, factories, clubs, art spaces, and concert halls. Her music is often inspired by the inherent beauty of found sounds, such as machines, destroyed pianos, warped 78 rpm records and jammed radio signals. She was dubbed “a master of musical feedback” by The New York Times, who wrote “Ms. Gosfield’s choice of sounds are never a mere gimmick. Her extraordinary command of texture and timbre means that whether she is working with a solo cello or with the ensemble she calls her “21st-century avant noisy dream band,” she is able to conjure up a palette of saturated and heady hues.” She is a 2021 music award winner from the academy of Arts and Letters, a 2017 Guggenheim fellow, the 2015 Fromm composer in residence at the American Academy in Rome, a 2012 fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, and the recipient of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts’ “Grants to Artists” award. Gosfield’s essays on composition have been published by the New York Times and featured in the book Arcana II. Active as an educator, she held the Darius Milhaud Chair at Mills College, and has taught composition at Columbia University, Princeton University, UT Austin, University of Indiana, and California Institute of the Arts.

In 2017 Gosfield collaborated with Yuval Sharon and the Los Angeles Philharmonic on the multi-site opera “War of the Worlds.” This large-scale, citywide collaborative performance was a powerful engagement with the public, bringing opera out of the concert hall and into the streets. Three defunct air raid sirens located in downtown Los Angeles were repurposed into public speakers to broadcast a free, live performance from Walt Disney Concert Hall. The siren sites also served as remote locations for singers and musicians to report back to the concert hall from the street. Orson Welles' notorious 1938 radio drama was brought to new life, directed by The Industry’s Yuval Sharon, conducted by Chris Rountree and narrated by Sigourney Weaver. The New York Times wrote about “Gosfield’s thrilling chamber orchestra writing,” and Alex Ross selected it as a “Notable Performance of 2017”

Dedicated to working closely with performers, Gosfield’s music has been commissioned and performed by some of the best interpreters of contemporary music worldwide, including the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the JACK Quartet, the Bang on a Can All-Stars, the Flux Quartet, MIVOS Quartet, String Noise, New Music Detroit, Athelas Sinfonietta, So Percussion, Talujon Percussion, Newband/The Harry Partch instruments, Agon Orchestra, Rova Sax Quartet, the Berlin Philharmonic's Scharoun Ensemble, Ensemble Phoenix, Joan Jeanrenaud, Stephen Gosling, Sarah Cahill, Lisa Moore, Felix Fan, Frances-Marie Uitti, Blair McMillen, Anthony de Mare, Kathleen Supove, Pauline Kim Harris, Jennifer Choi, George Kentros, and many more. Her music has been conducted by Pierre-André Valade, Brad Lubman, Rossen Milanov, Christopher Rountree, David Bloom, and Roger Smalley, and featured at festivals including Warsaw Autumn, Ecstatic Music, ISCM World Music Days, Gaudeamus Muziekweek, The Bang on a Can Marathon, Loud Weekend, MaerzMusik, Internationale Ensemble Modern Akademie, L.A.'s Noon to Midnight, The Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, Festival Musique Actuelle Victoriaville, Wien Modern, Spoleto Festival USA, OtherMinds, MATA, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Settembre Musica Festival, Schleswig-Holstein Festival, Company Week, and three "Radical New Jewish Culture" festivals curated by John Zorn. Gosfeld’s music has been presented at venues including Lincoln Center, The Miller Theatre, Merkin Hall, The Stone, The Kitchen (New York City); Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco); Walt Disney Concert Hall, Monday Evening Concerts, REDCAT Theater (Los Angeles); Walker Art Center (Minneapolis); Teatro Olimpico (Rome); Théâtre de la Ville (Paris); Ujazdowski Castle (Warsaw); The Hermitage (Saint Petersburg); and many other spaces worldwide.

Active as a performer and improviser, Gosfield has played with Derek Bailey, Ikue Mori, Roger Kleier, John Zorn, Fred Frith, Chris Cutler, Laurie Anderson, Billy Martin, Steven Bernstein, Brian Chase, Scanner, Marc Ribot, Ches Smith, Joey Baron, Sim Cain, David Moss, Sylvie Courvoisier, Mani Neumeier, Davey Williams, and LaDonna Smith.

Large-scale compositions include The Secret Life of Planets: Heavenly Bodies and Earthly Gossip, a song cycle drawn in part from her 2017 opera War of the Worlds, premiered by the L.A. Philharmonic New Music Group; the signature piece EWA7, a site-specific work created during a residency in the industrial environments of Nuremberg, Germany; Detroit Industry, inspired by, and performed under Diego Rivera's iconic "Detroit Industry" murals; Signal Jamming and Random Interference, composed in close collaboration with the JACK Quartet, with samples of jammed wartime radio signals performed by Gosfield alongside JACK at Roulette, NYC; Daughters of the Industrial Revolution, a concert-length piece inspired by her grandparents’ immigrant experiences in New York City during the Industrial Revolution, commissioned by the MAP fund at The Kitchen; and Floating Messages and Fading Frequencies, the first in a series of works that examined the radio transmissions of resistance groups in WWII, conducted by Pierre André Valade, premiered by the Athelas Sinfonietta and Gosfield’s trio in a 2011 UK tour that included Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival.

Gosfield's discography includes four ambitious solo releases on the Tzadik label. Her most recent solo CD, “Almost Truths and Open Deceptions” includes a piece for solo piano and broken shortwave radio, a chamber cello concerto, a quartet inspired by deteriorating 78 records, and a five minute blast by her own band. It was included in year-end lists by Alex Ross of the New Yorker and Seth Colter Walls of The Awl. “Lost Signals and Drifting Satellites” demonstrates her very personal approach to contemporary classical music, at once noisy, melodic, and atmospheric. It features four recent compositions drawn from her extensive work for soloists and ensembles, performed by Joan Jeanrenaud, the FLUX Quartet, and others. Her 2001 Tzadik CD ”Flying Sparks and Heavy Machinery” features two large–scale pieces inspired by her residency in the factories of Nuremberg, Germany: EWA7, performed by Roger Kleier (guitar), Ikue Mori (electronics), Sim Cain and Jim Pugliese (percussion) and Gosfield (sampling keyboards); and Flying Sparks and Heavy Machinery, performed by The Flux Quartet and Talujon Percussion Quartet. Gosfield's first solo CD “Burnt Ivory and Loose Wires”, focuses on music inspired by detuned and destroyed instruments, performed by her own ensemble, ROVA, and cellist Ted Mook. Other recent releases include Ghost Radios and Audio Mirages, a spatialized new work for cellist Johannes Moser (Platoon); Screech for Scratch on "For the Birds," a 20-LP release featuring Yo-Yo Ma, Laurie Anderson, Elvis Costello, and many others, that benefits the Audubon Society; and Long Waves and Random Pulses on "Wild at Heart," Pauline Kim Harris’s Chaconne Project. Other CD’s include The Blue Horse Walks on the Horizon on New Amsterdam by the Jasper Quartet; Lightning Slingers and Dead Ringers, an extended work for piano and sampler performed by Lisa Moore; and The Manufacture of Tangled Ivory by the Bang on a Can AllStars. Annie's music has also been featured on CD's released by ECM, Sony Classical, CRI, Harmonia Mundi, Wergo, Recommended, Caprice, Cantaloupe, Rift, EMF, Innova, Atavistic, ORF, Mode, and Starkland.

Annie has collaborated on installations with artist Manuel Ocampo, and created a video titled Shoot the Player Piano5 for an imaginary orchestra of destroyed instruments which has been shown at film festivals internationally. She composed and performed music for Christopher Walken’s play “Him” at the Public Theater. Her music has been featured by many choreographers and dance companies, such as Karole Armitage, Susan Marshall, Pam Tanowitz, Les Grands Ballet Canadiens, Didy Veldman with Skanes Dansteater, Oregon Ballet Theater, Milwaukee Ballet, Gruppen Fyra (Finland), and Ballett der Staatsoper Hannover. In 2015 Annie presented a a noisy, new music dance band at the Ecstatic Music Festival that played music driven by analog synth sounds, machines, and vacuums, featuring Downtown luminaries Billy Martin, Roger Kleier, and a horn section led by trumpeter Steven Bernstein.

Gosfield is a regular curator at the Stone, John Zorn's new music venue at the New School. In July, 2018 Steve Smith wrote "The common thread binding the freewheeling improvisational groups and innovative, eclectic chamber works she’ll present in this Stone series is her uncommonly nuanced discernment of noise as both a doorway to visceral catharsis and an allusive tool to evoke other places and times." The New Yorker, July 30, 2018. In August, 2010, Gosfield curated a month at The Stone, presenting a performances by some of New York’s best interpreters of new music, with over 20 premieres and unanimously good notices at the East Village performance space. In May, 2014, she presented a varied week of her own music, including premieres, chamber music, improvisations, and performances by her own band.

The New York Times published several of Gosfield’s articles on composition in “The Score”, a series on music featured in their Opinionator section. An article by Gosfield on the creative process titled “Fiddling With Sputnik” was published in the book Arcana II, edited by John Zorn. Her work has been profiled on National Public Radio, and in articles in MusikTexte, The New York Times, The Wire, Contemporary Music Review, Avant Magazine, Strings Magazine, as well as the book Music and the Creative Spirit. Prominent musicologist Sabine Feisst has published and presented several papers on Gosfield’s work, including Musik – Stadt: Traditionen und Perspektiven urbaner Musikkulturen, (Leipzig: Gudrun Schröder Verlag, 2012), and published her research on Gosfield in MusikTexte. In 2013 a conference on Gosfield’s work was held in Graz, Austria.

Gosfield developed new music for orchestra during a residency with the Chautauqua Symphony Orchestra sponsored by the League of American Orchestras, and has received fellowships from the Academy of Arts and Letters (2021), the Guggenheim Foundation (2017), the American Academy in Berlin (2012), the American Academy in Rome (2015), the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the McKnight Foundation, New York Foundation for the Arts, Civitella Ranieri, and the Siemens Foundation. She has received grants and awards from the MAP Fund, NYSCA, NewMusicUSA, the League of American Orchestras/Music Alive!, the NEA, Meet the Composer, the Argosy Foundation, the American Composers Forum, the Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust, The Rockefeller Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, the American Music Center, and U.S. Artists at International Festivals, among others.

Annie was a visiting lecturer, teaching composition at Columbia University from 2018-2021, was a visiting lecturer at Princeton in 2007, and held the Darius Milhaud Chair of Composition at Mills College in 2003 and 2005. In 2019 she was a visiting professor of composition at UT Austin, and in 2022 she taught at the University of Indiana. She was a visiting artist at Cal Arts in 1999, and guest composer at the Eastman School. Gosfield is on the advisory council of the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, an artists’ residency program based in Umbria.