Annie Gosfield’s work combines notated and improvised music, electronic and acoustic sounds, writing music for others and playing in her own group. Her music is often inspired by the inherent beauty of non-musical sounds, such as machines, destroyed pianos, warped 78 rpm records and detuned radios. Hailed as “a star of the downtown scene” by the New Yorker magazine, her varied work methods have taken her on a path through international festivals, concert halls, universities, art spaces, and clubs.
Gosfield has been awarded fellowships from the American Academy in Berlin (2012), the Foundation for Contemporary Arts (2008), New York Foundation for the Arts, the Siemens Foundation, and the Mcknight Foundation. She has received grants from NewMusicUsa, The Map Fund, USArtists International, Meet the Composer, and many others. Active as a writer and teacher, she is a regular contributor to the New York Times series “The Score”, and was the Milhaud Professor of composition at Mills College, a visiting lecturer at Princeton University and a visiting artist at Cal Arts. She is on the advisory council of the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, an artists’ residency program based in Umbria. In August, 2010, she curated The Stone, presenting a month of 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. Prominent musicologist Sabine Feisst has published and presented several papers on Gosfield’s work, most recently Musik – Stadt: Traditionen und Perspektiven urbaner Musikkulturen, (Leipzig: Gudrun Schröder Verlag, 2012), and published her research on Gosfield in MusikTexte. Dedicated to working closely with performers, Gosfield has been commissioned and collaborated with many musicians and ensembles, such as Joan Jeanrenaud, Lisa Moore, Felix Fan, Frances-Marie Uitti, Jennifer Choi, the Bang on a Can All-Stars, MIVOS Quartet, Flux Quartet, Athelas Sinfonietta, Agon Orchestra, Spit Orchestra, and Talujon Percussion. She has performed with John Zorn, Laurie Anderson, Fred Frith, Chris Cutler, Derek Bailey, Ikue Mori, Ches Smith, Roger Kleier, and many others. Her work has been performed internationally at festivals including MaerzMusik, The Bang on a Can Marathon, Warsaw Autumn, The Venice Biennale, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, ISCM Music Days, Gaudeamus Muziekweek, Musique Actuelle (Victoriaville), River to River (NYC), and Otherminds.
While in residence at The Watermill Center, Annie Gosfield will also compose and research “Signal Jamming and Random Interference” for string quartet with electronics, to be performed by The Jack Quartet at Roulette in New York City on December 7. The concert-length piece will be inspired by the sounds, processes, and perceptions of jammed radio signals. This work will be a continuation of research the artist did during a 2012 fellowship at the American Academy in Berlin, where she obtained rare recordings of jammed radio signals from Italy, Germany, The Soviet Union, and the U.S.