Anne LeBaron

Hailed by The New Yorker as an “unusually inventive composer,” an “innovative [harpist],” and overall “admired West Coast experimentalist,” Anne LeBaron's compositions resonate worldwide—performed from Kazakhstan to Italy to New York. Merging classic grandeur with avant-garde dynamism, her seven operas evoke tales of iconic figures like Pope Joan, Aldous Huxley, and Marie Laveau. Described by the LA Times as a “composer as transformer,” and “idiosyncratic visionary” whose music is at once “provocative,” “powerful,” and “always changing, and always captivating” LeBaron has and continues to masterfully explore myriad cultural and philosophical topics through music.

A Fulbright Scholar before earning her Columbia doctorate, LeBaron's talent has been recognized with the Alpert Award, a Guggenheim, and numerous other accolades, including a prestigious Opera America Discovery Grant for the ambitious and tantalizing LSD: Huxley’s Last Trip. Leading ensembles—including the National Symphony Orchestra and the Los Angeles Philharmonic—have programmed her work at venues such as the Hollywood Bowl, the Kennedy Center, and Carnegie Hall.

Spanning five and a half decades, pieces from multiple eras of LeBaron’s prodigious body of work will be performed in the 2024-2025 concert season. One of her newest projects, the ambitious and iterative Heroine with a Thousand Faces, will have its world premiere in 2024. A multi-year endeavor aiming to create one thousand musical portraits of women, the premiere will feature five original solos honoring figures such as Leymah Gbowee and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Described as “hilariously funny and unexpectedly surreal” (Merker Dusek), LeBaron’s one-woman opera Sucktion will be staged for the first time in the U.S. Excerpts from her critically acclaimed LSD: Huxley’s Last Trip—in which “she expands consciousness with an expanded orchestra, incorporating Harry Partch's gorgeously weird microtonal instruments into the orchestra in a way no one has thought of before” (LA Times)—will be performed at REDCAT in Los Angeles. Her opera Blue Calls Set You Free, composed in 1995, will be performed in Russia as part of the “Muffled Voices” festival. More information about additional upcoming performances can be found at annelebaron.com.

Described by John Corbett as “one of the great artists of our era,” LeBaron has been pushing the boundaries of experimental harp performance since her days in the 1970s and 80s New York City avant-garde jazz scene. Her career as a performer continues to this day. “Infrathin IV”—a graphic score inspired by Marcel Duchamp—showcases an ensemble improvisation where her influence on experimental harp performance techniques can be heard. Celebrating her 2-CD recording, “1, 2, 4, 3”, The New York City Jazz Record writes, “The artist inhabits her massive instrument as if it were a continent; she fords its rivers of strings and discovers new worlds in the crevices of tonality.” She performs regularly with the Present Quartet (featuring Ellen Burr on flutes, Jeff Schwartz on bass, and Charles Sharp on clarinets/saxophones), most recently at the 2023 Outsound New Music Summit in Berkeley, California.

As a member of the School of Music faculty at CalArts, she has developed highly original courses blending music with theater, art history, literature, and other culturally and politically resonant topics, while encouraging students to actively create work incorporating ideas emerging from these classes. A representative sample of the classes would include HyperOpera; Concert Theater; Musical Reflections of Surrealism; Music of Harry Partch; Writing for Everything Else; and Contemplative Practices, Musical Arts, Compassionate Mind.

LeBaron has served for many years on the board of the American Composers Forum, where she has been Chair of the Board for the past two years. Also an accomplished harpist, she is renowned for pioneering methods of extended harp techniques, electronic enhancements, and notation in compositional and improvisational contexts. In the past several seasons, she has lectured on her music at Monash University, the University of Adelaide, the Totally Huge New Music Festival in Perth, the University of Canterbury, as well as USC, UCLA, UC Irvine, and Cal State Fullerton.