About this Artist
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. Dubbed “a star of the downtown scene” by The New Yorker, her music is often inspired by the inherent beauty of found sounds.
She was a 2012 fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, and the 2015 Fromm Composer in Residence at the American Academy in Rome. Dedicated to working closely with performers, Gosfield has been commissioned by and collaborated with the JACK Quartet, Bang on a Can All-Stars, MIVOS Quartet, Flux Quartet, Athelas Sinfonietta, West Australia Symphony Orchestra, Joan Jeanrenaud, Lisa Moore, Felix Fan, Frances-Marie Uitti, Nadia Shpachenko, and Anthony De Mare. She has performed with John Zorn, Laurie Anderson, Fred Frith, Chris Cutler, Derek Bailey, Ikue Mori, Billy Martin, Roger Kleier, and many others. Her work has been performed at Warsaw Autumn, Bang on a Can Marathon, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Ecstatic Music Festival, Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, Wien Modern, OtherMinds, Spoleto Festival, Company Week, and MATA.
Annie’s discography includes four portrait CDs on the Tzadik label. Her latest CD, Almost Truths and Open Deceptions, includes a piece for solo piano and broken shortwave radio, a chamber cello concerto, and a quartet inspired by deteriorating 78 records. Large-scale projects include EWA7, a site-specific work created during a residency in the industrial environments of Nuremberg, Germany; Signal Jamming and Random Interference, composed in close collaboration with the JACK Quartet, incorporates samples of jammed wartime radio signals; and Daughters of the Industrial Revolution, a concert-length piece inspired by her grandparents’ immigrant experiences in New York City during the Industrial Revolution. She writes about the compositional process for The New York Times’ series “The Score.” Gosfield held the Darius Milhaud chair of composition at Mills College, and has taught at Princeton University and CalArts. Upcoming projects include new music for orchestra in a residency sponsored by the League of American Orchestras.