“This was highly inventive music on every level; hugely enjoyable and deeply involving with a constant sense of surprise…”The Washington Post
Composer Judith Shatin (www.judithshatin.com) is renowned for her acoustic, electroacoustic and digital music. Called “highly inventive on every level” by the Washington Post, her music combines an adventurous approach to timbre with dynamic narrative design and sensitivity to the world around us. She draws on expanded instrumental palettes and a cornucopia of the sounding world, from machines in a coal mine, to the calls of animals, the shuttle of a wooden loom, the pull of a zipper. Audiences and performers alike respond enthusiastically to her music, called ‘vividly orchestrated and bursting with imaginative detail’ by the San Francisco Chronicle. Her music ranges from chamber to choral and orchestral; from purely electronic to electroacoustic and multimedia formats. She applies her innovations in each to the other, melding timbral extensions with the beauty of perceptible structure. In addition to her concert music, she has embarked on a series called Quotidian Music, embracing the sounds of everyday objects, as in Zipper Music. She creates music for virtuosos, children and those with no musical training, believing that the joy of music-making should be open to all.
Shatin’s music has been commissioned by organizations including the Barlow Endowment and Fromm Foundation, Carnegie Hall, the Library of Congress and many others. She has received four NEA Composer Fellowships as well as grants from the American Music Center, the Lila Acheson Wallace-Readers Digest Arts Partners Program, Meet the Composer and the Virginia Commission for the Arts. Her music has been recorded on more than 30 albums, including those on Innova (two portrait discs), Neuma, New World, Ravello and Sonora. Shatin is William R. Kenan Jr. Professor Emerita at the University of Virginia, where she founded the Virginia Center for Computer Music and led the program to national prominence.