Kati Agócs


Kati Ilona Agócs is a Canadian composer and a member of the composition faculty at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, Massachusetts.

Education

Agócs attended the Juilliard School in New York where she earned a Master's and Doctoral degrees under the guidance of Milton Babbitt. She was a composition fellow at the Aspen Music Festival and School and the Tanglewood Music Center, where she held the ASCAP Leonard Bernstein Composer Fellowship in 2007.

Career

From 2005 to 2006, she lived in Budapest and wrote on the new-music scene in Hungary for the journal The Musical Times. She had previously organized an exchange program between the Juilliard School and the Liszt Academy. The Hungarian-language weekly, Bécsi Napló acknowledged her contribution to the visibility of Hungarian composers abroad. She served as Composer in Residence for the National Youth Orchestra of Canada in 2010.
Agócs was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2013. In 2014 the American Academy of Arts and Letters named her as recipient of the Arts and Letters Award in Music. She maintains a work studio in Flatrock, Newfoundland, Canada.

Personal life

Agócs is married to the American composer Robert Beaser.

Music

recorded and released the 2016 album The Debrecen Passion, named one of the top 10 Classical albums of 2016 by the Boston Globe. The title track of this album was nominated in 2017 by the Canadian Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences for a Juno Award, "Classical Composition of the Year.
Agócs has written on American music for the journal Tempo and also created a critical edition of the Symphony in A Major by Leopold Damrosch.

Select principal works

Solo and chamber works up to seven instruments