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CompFest

Each year, Emory CompFest brings innovative national and international musicians to Emory, where they work with students and faculty and present their music in concert to the greater-Atlanta community. We seek artists who work in ways that expand traditional compositional frameworks and who can offer exciting and meaningful creative exchanges with the community. This year’s CompFest is a special collaboration organized jointly with Georgia Tech’s School of Music.

CompFest 2024: Ecologies of Sound

February 7 – 11, 2024, at Emory University and GA Tech

CompFest 2024: Ecologies of Sound presents a series of performances and other events that examine our sonic relationships to the more-than-human world and our planet’s dramatically shifting soundscape. The festival will feature the music of Annea Lockwood, a legendary composer, sound artist, and acoustic ecologist and member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, who is renowned for her focus on the effects of sound in our environments. 

Headlining this year’s CompFest is the internationally acclaimed New York-based piano and percussion quartet Yarn/Wire that New York Classical Review said "may well be the most important new music ensemble on the classical scene today."  Along with Lockwood’s music, the ensemble will perform the Fromm Foundation-supported premiere by Emory faculty composer Katherine Young of BIOMES 6.0, as well as a new work by Tech graduate composer Lauren McCall. During their residency, Yarn/Wire will also work with student composers, performers, and technologists at both institutions, and these collaborations will be featured on the concerts. Beyond the concert hall, the festival will engage the public in soundwalks, listening stations, and panel discussions with musicians, scholars, and scientists - including David Haskell and Andrea Bohlman - investigating the ways in which music and sound can amplify our attention to and stewardship of the world around us. 

This year, CompFest is presented in conjunction with the exhibition Songs from the Compost: Mutating Bodies, Imploding Stars at the Michael C. Carlos Museum, opening February 3, 2024. 

COMPFEST 2024 PUBLIC EVENTS

Acknowledgements

The CompFest 2024 events are co-sponsored by Emory University Music Department (Composition, Piano Performance, and Orchestral Studies areas), Emory Integrated Visual Arts program, Emory Department of Environmental Sciences, and the Michael C. Carlos Museum; and the Georgia Tech School of Music, Georgia Tech Arts, the Georgia Tech College of Design, Georgia Tech Environmental Science (ENVS/GT Amplify Momentum Grant), and the School of Biological Sciences. This project is sponsored in part by the Emory Friends of Music, the Emory Music Department’s McDowell Fund, Emory's CFDE Public Scholarship Fund, Emory Arts Project Grant, Emory Youth Symphony Orchestra, and Emory’s Hightower Fund, as well as the Fromm Music Foundation at Harvard University and the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation.