About

Amy Golden is a composer, sound artist, and ceramist based in Baltimore. She creates works for chamber ensembles, solo voice and solo instruments, orchestra, choir, and found sound sources as well as sound and/or sculptural installations and ceramic objects. Her work centers around questions of texture, translation across mediums, domesticity, furniture, the relationship between sound and object, and methods of personal record keeping. Her works have been performed and shown in concert halls, festivals, galleries, dirty basements, and other venues throughout the U.S. She has worked collaboratively with musicians, visual artists, choreographers, and theater directors. Frequent collaborators include Preston Haining, Eric Heep, Rachel Iba, Ethan Marks, Erin Demastes, and Luke Martin, whose works she has recorded for release on Reading Group and Editions Wandelweiser.

As a vocalist, her experience also includes performances and recordings with International Contemporary Ensemble, with whom she performed the west cost premier of John Luther Adams’ Sila: Breath of the World at the Ojai Music Festival, Dave Brubeck, hip-hop recording artists Why?, The Mothers of Invention, North Texas Jazz Singers, with whom she recorded a studio album, was a Downbeat award recipient, and headlined the national Jazz Educators Network conference, and Suara Baru, an experimental gamelan with whom she performed at REDCAT, as well as private studio session work. While in Los Angeles, she was a founding member of the Contemporary Choral Collective of Los Angeles (C3LA), a group of singers, composers, and conductors dedicated to the performance of progressive choral and group-singing music of the last 25 years, and HEX, a contemporary vocal sextet specializing in experimental, interdisciplinary, and extended vocal performance, including the west coast premier of Meredith Monk’s Dolman Music. Frequent performance venues included Automata, REDCAT, Zipper Hall, Betalevel, Coaxial, Human Resources, the wulf., Pieter Space, Rec Center, Monk Space, NAVAL, and The Mortuary. She is a current founding member of Artifice Ensemble, a contemporary choral collective based in Washington DC.

In her solo performances, Amy interweaves classical training with vocal experimentation and exploration, often in conjunction with the non-traditional use of instruments and objects and with special attention to honesty in acoustics.

When working with clay and other sculpture, she often approaches the materials in the same way she might approach sound. Rather, she often approaches sound as she would a sculpture, but only came to physical sculpture and functional art much later. She currently teaches Clay Club, a ceramics workshop on varying topics for community members, out of her studio.

She works occasionally as a composer, arranger, music director, and vocal coach for fellow artists’ theatre and multimedia work and songwriters’ recording projects.

Amy holds an MFA in composition and vocal performance from the California Institute of the Arts, where she also studied ceramics, and a BA in music from the University of North Texas, where she studied composition and voice.