Kati Agócs

Early life & education

Agócs was raised on a small farm in Southwestern Ontario by Hungarian and American parents. Her father left Hungary after the Hungarian Uprising of 1956 and traveled to Italy and the United States before finally settling in Canada. At the age of sixteen Agócs left home to represent the province of Ontario at Lester B. Pearson College of the Pacific (one of the United World Colleges), where she played guitar and sang in a Sonic Youth-inspired rock band whose members included the art curator Massimiliano Gioni. She accepted a full scholarship to Sarah Lawrence College based on a visual art portfolio, changing her focus to music in her junior year. From 1998 to 2005, Agócs attended the Juilliard School in New York where she earned a Master's and Doctoral degrees under the guidance of Milton Babbitt. She was a composition fellow at the Aspen Music Festival and School and the Tanglewood Music Center, where she held the ASCAP Leonard Bernstein Composer Fellowship in 2007.

Music

Kati Agócs's compositions have been commissioned and played by Eighth Blackbird, the Boston Symphony Chamber Players, the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, the American Composers Orchestra, the National Arts Centre Orchestra, Metropolis Ensemble, the CBC Radio Orchestra, the Minnesota Orchestra, and Boston Modern Orchestra Project, which has performed and recorded five of her works. Her music was an Audience Choice winner at the SONiC (Sounds of a New Century) Festival in New York in 2011, and was archived at WQXR Radio.

Kati Agócs’s music is lyrical, emotionally direct, and dramatic, with clear overall architectures. One hears a natural affinity with vocal impulses, fluid melodic lines, and responsiveness to literature from different cultures. Her work for chorus and orchestra The Debrecen Passion (2015) surrounds settings of poetry by Szilárd Borbély with mystical texts of Medieval Latin, Hungarian, and Georgian origin, as well as a Kabalistic prayer. The work places meditations on the fragility of love and its expression within a larger religious narrative with elements of intense lament and exultation. Agócs dialogues with earlier composers, including a homage to György Ligeti as the second movement of her quintet Immutable Dreams (2007). She employs Serialist techniques to re-imagine a Bach chorale in Versprechen (2004). Agócs performs her own works as a soprano soloist and collaborates with instrumentalists to develop distinct techniques and musical colors. One of many such collaborations is her work with Bridget Kibbey to create a bluegrass piece for harp as part of the suite Every Lover is a Warrior (2006).

Agócs has written on American music for the Journal Tempo and also created a critical edition of the Symphony in A Major by Leopold Damrosch, father of Walter Damrosch.

Career

From 2005 to 2006, she lived in Budapest and wrote with the support of a Fulbright Fellowship, a candid inside glimpse of the new-music scene in Hungary for the journal The Musical Times. She had previously organized an exchange program between Juilliard and the Liszt Academy. As a result of these activities, the Hungarian-language weekly, Bécsi Napló (Vienna Journal) acknowledged her contribution to the visibility of Hungarian composers abroad. In 2007 she was one of ten Canadian composers selected by CBC Radio to write a Prelude and Fugue for solo piano in honor of the 75th anniversary of Glenn Gould. She served as Composer in Residence for the National Youth Orchestra of Canada during their Fiftieth Anniversary season in 2010.

Kati Agócs was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2013. In 2014, the American Academy of Arts and Letters presented her with the Arts and Letters Award in Music, which "honors outstanding artistic achievement and acknowledges the composer who has arrived at his or her own voice". She began her teaching career at Memorial University of Newfoundland’s School of Music (2006–2008), and has been a member of the composition faculty of the New England Conservatory in Boston since 2008. She maintains a permanent work studio in Flatrock, Newfoundland, and is an Associate Composer of the Canadian Music Centre’s Atlantic Region.

In 2014 she was one of four composers commissioned by The Boston Symphony Orchestra to write a work for the Boston Symphony Chamber Players, a chamber group consisting of the orchestra’s principal players, in celebration of their Fiftieth Anniversary.

Principal Works

Solo and chamber works up to seven instruments

Orchestra/Large Ensemble