Kala Pierson


Bryn Mawr, PA

Music/Composition


Kala Pierson's music is vivid, full-throated, and rooted in the joy and urgency of communication. Whether writing boundary-pushing music for The Crossing and American Opera Projects, installing audio in an abandoned fortress, or performing endurance art at the Guggenheim Museum, she works from her own meditative and sensory/sensual experience, producing deeply embodied music that challenges while luxuriating in the performers' best qualities.

Kala's music has been performed in 35 countries on six continents, widely awarded and commissioned, and published by Universal Edition. Her music's "seductive textures and angular harmonies" (Washington Post) build into "massive chords throwing out a wall of sound, like a modern-day Gabrieli" (San Francisco Classical Voice), and her focus on documentary and culturally resonant subject matter leads to works of "marvellous political power" (Louis Andriessen).

She's held season-long composer residencies with American Opera Projects, Tribeca Performing Arts Center, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and San Francisco Choral Artists. Recently, she's been the featured guest composer of Truman State University's New Horizons Festival; a resident at Yaddo, MacDowell, the Britten-Pears Foundation, and the Banff Centre's Leighton Artists Colony; and a Big Sky Choral Initiative Composer Fellow with The Crossing.

Kala's sound work has been called "uniquely organic" and "innovative" (New York Times) for its focus on acoustic sound sources rather than computer-generated sounds, and has been heard in major festivals including the International Computer Music Conference (USA), Musica Viva (Portugal), Contemporanea/Citta di Udine (Italy), International Congress of Art and Technology (Brazil), SEAMUS National (USA), Canaan Downs (New Zealand), Art Basel Miami Beach (USA), impuls (Austria), and Ars Musica (Belgium).

Taking great joy in collaboration, Kala has initiated many international projects and has appeared as a guest composer or lecturer at the Hochschule für Musik Köln (Germany), Musikhögskolan i Piteå (Sweden), and many U.S. conservatories and universities. She represented the U.S. in the Swedish government's 2015 KIM grant exchange, meeting with leading Swedish musicians and working as a Composer in Residence at the VICC / ISCM Gotland Section.

Her career-long love for finding and setting meaningful, recent texts has led her to settings of American journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal and others writing from death row; Cameroonian gay rights martyr Roger Mbede; texts in honor of the blacklivesmatter movement; and the many writers in her Axis of Beauty project (in which, since 2004, she has collected and set to music a broad range of texts by living Middle Eastern writers).

Kala's awards include those from the Mauricio Kagel International Composition Competition; New Music USA; American Composers Forum; Meet the Composer; ASCAP; Lower Manhattan Cultural Council; VocalEssence; Dale Warland's Choral adVentures; the Gregg Smith Biennial Composition Prize; the 2016 GALA Choruses consortium commission from fifteen U.S. choral groups; and the Austrian, German, Serbian, and Swedish ministries of culture.

Born in 1977, she studied at Eastman School of Music (with Joseph Schwantner, Augusta Read Thomas, David Liptak, and Robert Morris) and at Bard College at Simon's Rock. At festivals, she's also worked with Steven Stucky, Chaya Czernowin, Henri Dutilleux, Bobby McFerrin, Louis Andriessen, and Ted Hearne. She's a self-taught santur (Persian hammered dulcimer) player and a laptop/audio performer. She lives in Philadelphia with her spouses and son.

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