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.

[1] 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.

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. tour that included the 2011 Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival.

Her 2012 release, Almost Truths and Open Deceptions, features a chamber cello concerto, a piece for piano and broken shortwave radio, and compositions inspired by warped 78 rpm records, baseball, and the industrial revolution, performed by the Annie Gosfield Ensemble, Felix Fan, the Flux Quartet, Real Quiet, Blair McMillen, David Cossin, and the Pearls Before Swine Experience.

Her previous Tzadik CD, Flying Sparks and Heavy Machinery, features two pieces inspired by her 1999 residency in the factories of Nuremberg, Germany.

She is a periodic contributor to "The Score", The New York Times blog where composers discuss their work and the issues involved in creating music in the 21st century.