Hailed as “a composer of imposing artistic gifts” (Gramophone Magazine) and “one of the brightest stars in her generation of composers” (Audiophile Audition), Kati Agócs writes “sublime music of fluidity and austere beauty” (The Boston Globe), that is “simmering, and lucid…and demands to be heard” (The New York Times). A recent Guggenheim Fellow, she is also a winner of the Arts and Letters Award, the lifetime achievement award in music composition from The American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a two-time nominee for Classical Composition of the Year in the Juno Awards. Kati Agócs is a citizen of Canada, the United States, and Hungary (European Union). She has served on the composition faculty at the New England Conservatory in Boston since 2008, and maintains a work studio in Flatrock, Newfoundland.
Recent works include a new, large-scale piece for soprano soloist, chorus, and orchestra, commissioned by the Jebediah Foundation; Transluminescence, her piano concerto for Nicolas Namoradze, commissioned by the Esther Honens International Piano Competition; her Horn Concerto for James Sommerville co-commissioned by a consortium of five U.S. and Canadian orchestras; and the cantata Voices of the Immaculate, written for Lucy Dhegrae and Third Sound Ensemble and co-commissioned by Miller Theatre at Columbia University, Chamber Music America, New Music USA, and the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society. The world premiere of Voices of the Immaculate took place as part of her Miller Theatre Composer Portrait in New York City. Zachary Woolfe wrote in The New York Times: “For once, singing of complete and utter clarity…a simmering new cantata, conceived with transparency as a first principle…entirely, word for word, lucid…her text demands to be heard, and is.”
Her music has been commissioned and performed by many other premier ensembles and organizations including the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, Minnesota Orchestra, Boston Symphony Chamber Players, Toronto Symphony Orchestra, Ensemble Reconsil Vienna, Lontano, Albany Symphony Orchestra, National Youth Orchestra of Canada, Claremont Trio, Hub New Music, Jupiter String Quartet, Continuum, Da Capo Chamber Players, Ensemble Contemporain de Montreal, National Arts Centre Orchestra, and the multiple Grammy-award winning ensemble Eighth Blackbird, who toured the U.S. with Immutable Dreams. She contributed a work to violinist Jennifer Koh’s Grammy award- winning album “Alone Together.”
Other recent compositions include Imprimatur (String Quartet #2), commissioned by the Harvard Musical Association, Krannert Center/University of Illinois, and the Aspen Music Festival and School to open the Aspen Music Festival; Concerto for Violin and Percussion Orchestra, commissioned by the Fromm Music Foundation at Harvard University for the New England Conservatory Percussion Ensemble; Rogue Emoji for Hub New Music, commissioned by Ashmont Hill Chamber Music with support from The Cricket Foundation; Morning Star, a motet commissioned by Boston’s Emmanuel Music in celebration of their Fiftieth Anniversary; and The Debrecen Passion, a work for women’s chorus and orchestra with texts by Szilárd Borbély. Her album The Debrecen Passion with Lorelei Ensemble and the Boston Modern Orchestra Project was named one of its Top Ten Classical Albums of 2016 by The Boston Globe, with Gramophone Magazine calling the title track “an iridescent wonder.”
Residencies include the Charles Ives Music Festival, Chelsea Music Festival, Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival, Oberlin University, National Youth Orchestra of Canada (as Composer-in-Residence for their Fiftieth Anniversary) and a curatorial residency with Metropolis Ensemble in the Bowery on New York’s Lower East Side. Awards and honours include the Guggenheim Fellowship; the Arts and Letters Award, Charles Ives Fellowship and Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; recording grants from the Aaron Copland Fund for Music; Composer fellowships from the Massachusetts Arts Council and the New York Foundation for the Arts; The Boston Foundation’s inaugural Brother Thomas Fellowship; the ASCAP Leonard Bernstein Fellowship at the Tanglewood Music Center; a Fulbright Fellowship to the Liszt Academy in Budapest; a Jacob K. Javits Fellowship from the U.S. Department of Education; residencies at the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo; and commissioning grants from the Canada Council for the Arts.
Born in Canada of Hungarian and American parents, Kati Agócs earned doctoral and Masters degrees from the Juilliard School, studying composition with Milton Babbitt, and studied voice privately with Adele Addison. She is an alumna of the Aspen Music School, Tanglewood Music Festival, Sarah Lawrence College, and Lester B. Pearson College of the Pacific (United World Colleges), where she represented the province of Ontario. Her works are published by Kati Agócs Music and distributed internationally by Theodore Front Musical Literature.
