Thomas Kotcheff


Thomas Kotcheff is an American composer and pianist who currently resides in Los Angeles. He is a winner of a 2016 Charles Ives Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a 2015 Presser Foundation Music Award.

Biography

Kotcheff was born in Wilmington, North Carolina and raised in Los Angeles, California. He began taking piano lessons at the age of 4 and in 2006 he graduated from Los Angeles County High School for the Arts. In 2010 Kotcheff completed a Bachelor of Music in Piano Performance from Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University and then attended USC Thornton School of Music from 2010 to 2019 where he received a Masters of Master of Music and a Doctor of Music in Music Composition. He has studied composition with Stephen Hartke, Donald Crockett, Frank Ticheli, and Steven Stucky, and piano with Benjamin Pasternack and Stewart L. Gordon.
Kotcheff currently serves as Ear Training and Music Theory Faculty at the Colburn School He is a teaching artist at the Los Angeles Philharmonic Composer Fellowship Program. Kotcheff has held residencies at Festival International d'Art Lyrique d'Aix-en-Provence, the Los Angeles Philharmonic's National Composers Intensive, The Hermitage Artist Retreat, The Studios of Key West, and The Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts.
Kotcheff is a founding member of the new music piano duo HOCKET with Sarah Gibson. He serves as a content contributor to 91.5 KUSC and is a livestream broadcast host for the Ojai Music Festival.

Selected works

Orchestral

Kotcheff provided the score to the 2019 independent film "The Planters."