Flannery Cunningham + Annie Gosfield
American Composers Forum, Philadelphia Chapter is pleased to present an online artist talk between composers Annie Gosfield and Flannery Cunningham. The two artists will discuss their creative process, reflect on their artistic influences, and share recent work.
FREE, REGISTRATION IS REQUIRED. SPACE IS LIMITED. PLEASE RESERVE ONE SPOT PER HOUSEHOLD. A Zoom link will be sent to you the day of the event.
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. Her music is often inspired by the inherent beauty of found sounds, noise, and machinery. In 2017 Gosfield collaborated with Yuval Sharon and the Los Angeles Philharmonic on the multi-site opera “War of the Worlds” that incorporated three defunct air raid sirens that were re-purposed into public speakers to broadcast a free, live performance to the streets of L.A. from Walt Disney Concert Hall. She has composed sitespecific music for factories; researched jammed radio signals; led a band driven by vacuum, machine, and analog synth sounds; and developed two orchestral pieces during a 2016 residency sponsored by the League of American Orchestras. Annie has been awarded fellowships and grants from the American Academy in Rome (2015), American Academy in Berlin (2012), the Foundation for Contemporary Arts (2008), New York Foundation for the Arts, the Siemens Foundation, the MAP Fund, NYSCA, Meet the Composer, and others. Gosfield’s discography includes four portrait CD’s on Tzadik, and compositions on Sony Classical, EMI, Innova, CRI, Mode, ReR, Harmonia Mundi, Wergo, CRI, and ECM. She has worked with The L.A. Philharmonic, Bang on a Can All-Stars, JACK Quartet, MIVOS Quartet, FLUX Quartet, Talujon Percussion, So Percussion, Joan Jeanrenaud, Kathleen Supové, Lisa Moore, Felix Fan, FrancesMarie Uitti, Stephen Gosling, Anthony DeMare, James Ilgenfritz, String Noise, and Jennifer Choi. Active as a writer and teacher, she contributes to the New York Times series “The Score,” and has been the Milhaud Professor of composition at Mills College, a visiting lecturer at Princeton University and a visiting artist at Cal Arts.
Flannery Cunningham is a composer and musicologist fascinated by vocal expression, illusion and auditory perception, and the compositional process. She aims to write music that surprises and delights. Among others, she has been commissioned by the Minnesota Center Chorale, the Cornell University Chorus, the College of St. Benedict/St. John’s University, and Grace Chorale of Brooklyn. Archival work forms part of her process as both a composer and researcher, and she has written dramatic works including an oratorio about the 6th-century Irish monk St. Brendan the Navigator and a (pre-Hamilton) opera about the Burr-Hamilton duel. An active poet, Flannery often writes her own texts and libretti. She is attracted to both the very old and very new; she has presented on the 14th-century master and fellow poet-composer Guillaume de Machaut at the International Medieval Congress and performed with Cork-based electronic ensemble CAVE at the 2014 International Computer Music Conference. In addition to acoustic ensembles she writes for live players with real-time electronics, always striving to create an environment that foregrounds the skills and musical voice of the performer. Flannery has also scored, performed, and sound designed for theatrical and dance productions in Oxford, UK and New York. She holds a BA from Princeton University, an MA from University College Cork as a Mitchell Scholar, an MA from Stony Brook University, and is currently pursuing a joint PhD in composition and musicology at the University of Pennsylvania.