Annie Gosfield

About

Annie Gosfield has spent her career tearing down the walls between concert music and noise, blending acoustic instruments with satellite transmissions, factory sounds, detuned radios, and the crackle of warped 78 rpm records. Based in New York, she takes her music everywhere from concert halls to actual factories, and her compositions have been played by ensembles like Bang on a Can Allstars, the FLUX Quartet, and So Percussion at festivals across Europe and North America. Her four solo albums on Tzadik Records give a solid overview of her obsessions. Flying Sparks and Heavy Machinery draws on a residency in Nuremberg's industrial plants, while Burnt Ivory and Loose Wires zeroes in on the eerie possibilities of a detuned piano. A major highlight of her career was her first opera, a setting of Orson Welles's The War of the Worlds that spilled out of Walt Disney Concert Hall and onto the streets of Los Angeles, broadcast through repurposed air raid sirens. She also holds a 2017 Guggenheim Fellowship and a 2021 Music Award from the Academy of Arts and Letters.