Portrayed in The New Yorker as “an admired West Coast experimentalist, who is an innovative performer on the harp as well as an unusually inventive composer,” Anne LeBaron’s compositions have been performed around the globe at venues in Italy, Mexico, Sydney, Vienna, Sweden, Germany, Brazil, France, Kazakhstan, New York, Los Angeles, and elsewhere. Her seven operas celebrate legendary figures such as Pope Joan, Eurydice, Marie Laveau, the American Housewife, and Aldous Huxley. She was granted one of the first Discovery Grants from Opera America for Huxley’s Last Trip. Prior to earning a doctorate from Columbia University, she won a Fulbright Full Scholarship to study with György Ligeti and Mauricio Kagel. She has also received the Alpert Award in the Arts, a Fromm Foundation commission award, and a Guggenheim; most recently, she was awarded a residency at the Bogliasco Study Center for the Arts and Humanities in Italy, and a Banff Centre Leighton Artist Residency in Canada.
Her orchestral works have been commissioned and performed by the National Symphony Orchestra and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, among others. Her chamber and solo compositions are widely performed and recorded. Premieres in 2018 include Partizan, for piano solo and actor, commissioned by the Fondazione Ferrero and performed by Lorenzo Marasso and Guido Tonini Bossi at the Alba Music Festival, and Les Confidences du Salon, commissioned by PianoSpheres for Mark Robson. Recordings of her music are available on Mode, New World Records, Ear-Rational, Innova, Music & Art, and Albany.
An accomplished harpist, LeBaron has pioneered extended harp techniques, electronic enhancements, and notation in compositional and improvisational contexts. In the fall of 2017, she toured extensively in Australia and New Zealand, and was featured as a composer and performer at the Totally Huge New Music Festival in Perth. She is a member of the Composition and Experimental Sound Practices Program faculty in the School of Music at CalArts in Los Angeles. In May 2018, she was elected to serve as Chair of the Board of the American Composers Forum, a national organization advocating for composers in the U.S.