Cindy Cox

Transparent yet richly multifaceted, Cindy Cox’s compositions synthesize old and new musical designs through linked strands of association, timbral fluctuation, and cyclic temporal processes. The natural world, ecology, and the concept of emergence inspire many of the special harmonies and textural colorations in her compositions, as in her piano trio la mar amarga, the octet Cañon, and the string quartet Patagón. 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.”

As a pianist, Cox has performed and recorded many of her solo piano compo­sitions, including the Sylvan pieces, Hieros­gamos: Seven Studies in Harmony and Resonance, and The Blackbird whistling/Or just after. A number of her works feature advanced technologies developed at UC Berkeley’s Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT), such as the Piano Sampler Etudes and Pianos. Works with text, such as Singing the lines, The Other Side of the World, and Hysteria evolved through colla­boration with her husband, poet John Campion.

Cox has received awards and commis­sions from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Fromm Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Mellon Foun­da­tion, the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Composers Forum, ASCAP, Meet the Composer, New Music USA, and the Fulbright Foundation. She has been a Fellow at Tanglewood, Aspen, the MacDowell Colony, Civitella Ranieri, and the Giardini La Mortella on the island of Ischia. Her recent commission from the Toul­min Foundation and the American League of Orchestras was for Dreaming a world’s edge, premiered by the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra in May 2022.

Her work has been performed at the Venice Biennale in Italy; the Leo Brouwer Festival of Music in Havana, Cuba; the Center for New Music in San Francisco; the Ameri­can Academy in Rome; Carnegie Hall, Merkin Hall, and Roulette in New York City; the National Gallery, the Library of Con­gress, and the Kennedy Center in Wash­ington, DC; the Biblioteca National in Buenos Aires, Argentina; and it Los Angeles at the REDCAT Center and the Aratani Theater with the Los Angeles Phil­harmonic Green Umbrella series. Interpreters include the Kronos Quartet, the Saint Paul Cham­ber Orchestra, the National Symphony, the California Symphony, the Alexander Quar­tet, the Paul Dresher Ensem­ble, the San Francisco Con­tempo­rary Music Players, Earplay, the Eco Ensemble, and the San Francisco Chamber Orchestra. Notable performers of her work include David Milnes, Gloria Cheng, Lucy Shelton, Oni Buchanan, Ann Yi, Laura Carmichael, and Jenny Q. Chai.

There are five monograph recordings of Cox’s music, including compilations of her complete string quartets by the Alexander Quartet on Naxos, and her piano music, on ArpaViva recordings. Her piano trio Wave I is available on Heard in Havana, a comp­ila­tion on the Innova label of new works performed in Cuba marking the first performance of American composers there since the embargo. Her scores are published by World a Tuning Fork Press.

Cindy Cox is presently Professor and former Chair of the Music Department at the University of California at Berkeley. For more information, visit www.cacox.com.