Annie Gosfield
Annie Gosfield (born September 11, 1960 in Philadelphia) is a New-York-based composer who 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 to festivals, factories, clubs, art spaces and concert halls. Much of her work combines acoustic instruments with electronic sounds, incorporating unusual sources such as satellite sounds, machine sounds, detuned or out-of-tune samples and industrial noises. Her work often contains improvisation and frequently uses extended techniques and/or altered musical instruments. She won a 2012 Berlin Prize. Work Gosfield's work includes large-scale compositions, opera, orchestral work, chamber music, electronic music, video projects, and music for dance. She uses traditional notation, improvisation and extended techniques to explore relationships between music and noise. Her music is often inspired by non-musical sounds, such as machines, destroyed pianos, warped 78 rpm records, and detuned radios. She often collaborated with musicians to emphasize their unique qualities. Gosfield's compositions have been performed internationally by The Bang on a Can Allstars, Agon Orchestra, Joan Jeanrenaud, Fred Frith, Felix Fan, Roger Kleier, Blair McMillen, William Winant, the FLUX Quartet, the Miami String Quartet, The Silesian String Quartet, So Percussion, Talujon Percussion, Newband (on the Harry Partch instruments) and many others, at festivals including Warsaw Autumn, ISCM World Music Days, Bang on a Can Marathon, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, Festival Musique Actuelle, Wien Modern, OtherMinds, Spoleto Festival USA, Company Week, Taktlos, and three "Radical New Jewish Culture" festivals curated by John Zorn. In November, 2017, The Los Angeles Philharmonic presented Gosfield's first opera, an original setting of Orson Welles's The War of the Worlds, adapted and directed by Yuval Sharon, simultaneously performed inside Walt Disney Concert Hall and on the streets of Los Angeles, using three repurposed air raid sirens to broadcast the music to the public in satellite performances in parking lots in Downtown Los Angeles. Gosfield has composed a site-specific work for a factory in Germany, collaborated on installations with artist Manuel Ocampo, and created a video for an imaginary orchestra of destroyed instruments. She has worked with many choreographers, including Karole Armitage, Pam Tanowitz, and Susan Marshall. Her music for dance has been featured at the Venice Biennale, the Next Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), Teatro Olimpico (Rome), The Joyce Theater, Jacob's Pillow, and the Duke Theater on 42nd Street. Her uncle was actor Maurice Gosfield. Her large-scale compositions include 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 and premiered at The Kitchen in 2011; the signature piece EWA7, a site-specific work created during a residency in the industrial environments of Nuremberg, Germany; and Floating Messages and Fading Frequencies, which incorporated coding systems used by the Resistance in WWII, conducted by Pierre-André Valade and performed by the Athelas Sinfonietta, with Gosfield's electronic trio in a four-city U.K.