Widely recognized for her work in instrumental, electronic, and performance realms, Anne LeBaron’s compositions have been described in The Washington Post as possessing “uncommon imagination and technical skill.”  Embracing an extraordinary array of subjects, ranging from contemporary adaptations of Greek and South American myths, to probes into physical and cultural forms of extinction, to the legendary Pope Joan, her works have earned numerous awards and prizes, including a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, the Alpert Award, a Fulbright Full Fellowship, an award from the Rockefeller MAP Fund for her opera, Sucktion, and a 2009-2010 Cultural Exchange International Grant from the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs for The Silent Steppe Cantata.

As a Fulbright Scholar to Germany in 1980 - 81, LeBaron studied with György Ligeti, and completed her doctorate in composition at Columbia University.  Her compositions have been written for virtually every contemporary genre and performed and broadcast throughout the U.S. and elsewhere, including Stuttgart, London, Prague, Talloires, Hong Kong, Sydney, Berlin, Havana, Kyoto, Singapore, Dresden, and Austria. During the summer spring and summer of 2008, she resided in Vienna, and gave several lectures at the Janáček Academy of Music and Performing Arts in Brno, at Palacký University in Olomouc, and at “Symposium,” a summer course in Trstenice in the Czech Republic.

Her one-woman cyberopera, Sucktion, was selected for inclusion in the New Original Works Festival, with three productions at REDCAT in Los Angeles in 2008. It was written in collaboration with the award-winning poet Douglas Kearney. Selections from her large-scale opera, Crescent City, also being written with Kearney, were performed by the New York City Opera in 2006 on the VOX festival, with new selections are scheduled for VOX in 2009. The Loos Ensemble performed Phantasmagoriettas from Crescent City during the Dag in die Branding Festival in Den Haag in December, 2007, with direction by Yuval Sharon. From the national newspaper,  De Trouw:

“…the work of the American Anne LeBaron was musically the most extensively developed. She is working on an opera that functions as a kind of ‘wake-up call’ for the disasters that threaten     humanity. If ever the ideal of melding different musical styles together came close, it was in this very enjoyable American mix of jazz, improvisation, and operatic passion.”                               

Wet, her opera about the big business of water and the horrors of floods, premiered at REDCAT in Los Angeles on Dec. 1-3, 2005. From the Los Angeles Times review:

“Wet is an ambitious and alarming new opera with strong music by Anne LeBaron. LeBaron's writing for the instrumental ensemble is full of invention. Cultures never collide, but many coexist. Her fluidity with musical style and with musical character is the real wetness of Wet.”

Her most recent recording, released by New World Records last fall, features a dance opera, Pope Joan, and a chamber work, Transfiguration. The publication Sequenza 21 says:

“Anne LeBaron writes ritualistic music of excitement and power. LeBaron’s voice is a distinctively late 20th century American one, embracing the European and American avant-garde traditions and American pop gestures with equal effect.”

And, from Gramophone,

“LeBaron’s score for mixed ensemble brilliantly evokes an imagined medievalism.”

The Silent Steppe Cantata, an upcoming project envisioned as a large-scale sonic portrait of the Republic of Kazakhstan, is an international collaborative combining the talents of American composer Anne LeBaron, Kazakh writer Beysenbay Suleimenov, the Kazakh children’s choir “Koktem,” the Kazakh National Folk Orchestra “Orchestra Otyrar Sazy,” and Kazakh tenor Timur Bekbosunov, with premieres planned in Kazakhstan and LA in 2010.

LeBaron currently teaches composition, and related subjects such as Concert Theater, at the California Institute of the Arts.  Her lectures at educational institutions, conferences, and festivals include subjects such as surrealism and music; environmental awareness through music and other art forms; and the concept of HyperOpera. These topics are also explored in articles, essays, and interviews published in several journals and books. An accomplished harpist, she is renowned for her pioneering methods of developing extended techniques and electronic enhancements for the harp. She serves on the national board of the American Composers Forum.

Links:
http://www.annelebaron.com
http://amphibient.blogspot.com
http://www.myspace.com/annelebaron