Cindy
Cox
Composer Bio
Radical, traditional, original, archetypal—neither modernist nor neo-tonal, Cindy Cox (b.1961) derives her “post-tonal” musical language from acoustics, innovations in technology, harmonic resonance, and poetic allusion. Naturally unfolding through linked strands of association, timbral fluctuation, and cyclic temporal processes, her compositions synthesize old and new musical designs.
As Robert Carl notes in Fanfare, “Cox writes music that demonstrates an extremely refined and imaginative sense of instrumental color and texture...This is well-wrought, imaginative, and not easily classifiable music.” Her work, always engaged with novel approaches to sound and instrumental color, combines with formality “to yield great depth of meaning and a playful appeal” (NewMusicBox, American Music Center).
Cox’s chamber and solo works use flexible orderings and combinations of instruments, such as in the large piano work Hierosgamos, the sextet Axis Mundi, and the trombone quartet and interactive electronic work Nature is. The newer texted works, such as The Other Side of the World for flute and CD sound, make feminist, environmental, and cultural critiques, and evolved through long association with poet John Campion.
She has received awards and commissions from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Fromm Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, ASCAP, Meet the Composer, and the Gemeinschaft der Kunstlerinnen und Kunstfreunde International Competition for Women Composers. She has been a Fellow at the Tanglewood Music Center, the Aspen Music Festival, the MacDowell Colony, and the Civitella Ranieri and William Walton Foundations in Italy.
Recent performances include [Four Studies of Light and Dark] for piano and percussion at the Festival di Musica Contemporanea at the American Academy in Rome, Hysteria, for trombone and four-channel tape at the Kosmos Frauenraum in Vienna (filmed for Austrian National Television), Münster Gesellschaft für Neue Musik, and the REDCAT/Cal Arts Theater in Los Angeles, The blackbird whistling/Or just after, for solo piano at Carnegie Hall, Into the Wild, by the Paul Dresher Ensemble at the Library of Congress, Cathedral Spires by the National Symphony at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC, Primary Colors on the Los Angeles Philharmonic Green Umbrella series, Columba aspexit, by the Kronos Quartet at Hertz Hall in Berkeley, and Axis Mundi by the Earplay Ensemble at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco.
A new recording of The
Other Side of the World has been released on the Capstone label (Point
of Entry: The Laurel project, Volume I, Contemporary Works for Solo Flute by
American Women Composers, Nina Assimakopoulos, flute, 2006). Another recording
on the CRI label (CRI 886) features chamber works Geode (Earplay Ensemble),
Columba aspexit (Alexander String Quartet), Primary Colors
(Earplay), and Into the Wild (the Paul Dresher Ensemble). Other recordings
may be found on the Capstone label ([Four Studies of Light and Dark]),
Mark (Coriolis), and Valve-Hearts-Studios of Cologne (Elegy).
Her scores are published through World a Tuning Fork Press (www.worldatuningfork.com).
A complete catalog of her recordings and scores may be found on Cox’s
website (www.cacox.com).
Earning her doctorate in 1992, Cox studied composition with Harvey Sollberger,
Donald Erb, Eugene O’Brien, and John Eaton at Indiana University; she
has also studied with John Harbison at the Tanglewood Music Center, and Bernard
Rands and Jacob Druckman at the Aspen Music Festival. She is a gifted pianist,
and studied with the famed Mozart and Schubert specialist Lili Kraus. Cindy
Cox is presently an Associate Professor at the University of California at Berkeley.