Biography

Anne LeBaron’s compositions embrace an exotic array of subjects encompassing vast reaches of space and time, ranging from the mysterious Singing Dune of Kazakhstan, to probes into physical and cultural forms of extinction, to legendary figures such as Pope Joan, Eurydice, Marie Laveau, and the American housewife. Widely recognized for her work in instrumental, electronic, and performance realms, she has earned numerous awards and prizes, including a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, the Alpert Award in the Arts, a Fulbright Full Fellowship, an award from the Rockefeller MAP Fund for her opera, Sucktion, and a 2009-2010 Cultural Exchange International Grant from the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs for The Silent Steppe Cantata.

As a Fulbright Scholar to Germany in 1980 - 81, LeBaron studied with György Ligeti, later completing her doctorate in composition at Columbia University. Her compositions have been written for virtually every contemporary genre and performed and broadcast throughout the U.S. and elsewhere, including Stuttgart, London, Prague, Talloires, Hong Kong, Sydney, Berlin, Havana, Kyoto, Singapore, Dresden, and Austria. During the spring and summer of 2008, she gave several lectures in the Czech Republic, at the Janáček Academy of Music and Performing Arts in Brno, and at Palacký University in Olomouc. She was also in residence at “Symposium,” a summer course in Trstenice.

Her one-woman cyborgopera, Sucktion, was performed several times at REDCAT in Los Angeles in 2008. Additional performances will take place in York, England, and in Sweden, with Ars Nova, in 2009. Selections from her large-scale opera, Crescent City, were performed by the New York City Opera in 2006 and 2009 on the VOX festival. Phantasmagoriettas from Crescent City, performed by The Loos Ensemble, was featured on the 2007 Dag in die Branding Festival in Den Haag. From the national newspaper, De Trouw:

“…the work of the American Anne LeBaron was musically the most extensively developed. She is working on an opera that functions as a kind of ‘wake-up call’ for the disasters that threaten humanity. If ever the ideal of melding different musical styles together came close, it was in this very enjoyable American mix of jazz, improvisation, and operatic passion.”

Wet, her opera about the big business of water and the horrors of floods, premiered at REDCAT in Los Angeles on Dec. 1-3, 2005. From the Los Angeles Times review:

“Wet is an ambitious and alarming new opera with strong music by Anne LeBaron. LeBaron's writing for the instrumental ensemble is full of invention. Cultures never collide, but many coexist. Her fluidity with musical style and with musical character is the real wetness of Wet.”

Her most recent recording, released by New World Records last fall, features a dance opera, Pope Joan, and a chamber work, Transfiguration. From the publication Sequenza 21:

"Anne LeBaron writes ritualistic music of excitement and power. LeBaron’s voice is a distinctively late 20th century American one, embracing the European and American avant-garde traditions and American pop gestures with equal effect."

From Gramophone,

“LeBaron’s score for mixed ensemble brilliantly evokes an imagined medievalism.”

The Silent Steppe Cantata, an upcoming project envisioned as a large-scale sonic portrait of the Republic of Kazakhstan, is an international collaborative with LeBaron as composer, Kazakh writer Beysenbay Suleimenov, the Kazakh children’s choir “Koktem,” the Kazakh National Folk Ensemble “Orchestra Sazgen Sazy,” and Kazakh tenor Timur Bekbosunov, with premieres planned in Kazakhstan and Los Angeles in 2010.

LeBaron currently teaches composition, and related subjects such as HyperOpera – Lyrical Psychogeography, Musical Reflections of Surrealism, and Concert Theater, at the California Institute of the Arts. These topics and others are also presented worldwide in lectures at educational institutions, conferences, and festivals, as well as in articles, essays, and interviews published in several journals and books. Also an accomplished harpist, LeBaron is renowned for her pioneering methods of developing and implementing extended harp techniques, electronic enhancements, and notation in compositional and improvisational contexts.