Catherine Lamb

Catherine Lamb (b. 1982, Olympia, WA. U.S.) is an active composer exploring the interaction of tone, summations of shapes and shadows, phenomenological expansions, the architecture of the liminal (states in between outside/inside), and the long introduction form. She began her musical life early, later abandoning the conservatory in 2003 to study Hindustani music in Pune, India. She received her BFA in 2006 under James Tenney and Michael Pisaro at CalArts in Los Angeles, where she first developed her research into the interaction of tone and continued to compose, teach, and collaborate with musicians (such as Laura Steenberge and Julia Holter on Singing by Numbers). In 2008 she received a W. A. Gerbode Foundation and W. & F. Hewlett Foundation Emerging Composers initiative for Dilations, premiered at the Other Minds festival in San Francisco. She mentored under the experimental filmmaker/Dhrupad musician Mani Kaul until his death in 2011. In 2012 she received her MFA in music/sound from the Milton Avery School of Fine Arts at Bard College in New York. She toured Shade/Gradient extensively and was awarded the Henry Cowell Research Fellowship to work with Eliane Radigue in Paris. In 2013 Lamb relocated to Berlin, Germany where she lives currently, and has written for ensembles such as Konzert Minimal, Dedalus, Ensemble neoN, the London Contemporary Orchestra, as well as the JACK Quartet; while collaborating regularly with Marc Sabat, Johnny Chang (Viola Torros), Bryan Eubanks, and Rebecca Lane. Her first orchestral work, Portions Transparent/Opaque, was premiered by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra at the 2014 Tectonics Festival in Glasgow and was conducted by Ilan Volkov. She completed a series of nine pieces entitled Prisma Interius (2016-18) in which the infinite opening filter from inner to outer perceptions are deeply explored. In 2019 she co-founded the collectively oriented Harmonic Space Orchestra in Berlin. She is a 2020 recipient of the Ernst von Siemens Composer's prize, a 2018 recipient of the Grants to Artists award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, a Staubach Fellow for the 2016 Darmstadt Summer course as well as a 2016-2017 Schloss Solitude Fellow. Her writings/recordings are published in KunstMusik, Open Space Magazine, QO2, NEOS, New World Records, Another Timbre, Other Minds, Winds Measure, Hubro Records, Black Pollen Press, Sound American, and Sacred Realism.