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Katherine Balch

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Katherine Balch
Born1991 (age 33–34)
San Diego, California, U.S.
Alma mater
OccupationComposer
Employer
Awards
Academic background
ThesisLiminal Spaces: Sonic Ecologies within and around the Music of Erin Gee (2022)
Doctoral advisorGeorge E. Lewis
Musical career
GenresContemporary classical music

Katherine Elise Balch[1] (born 1991) is an American composer. She is a 2025 Guggenheim Fellow and winner of a 2025 Royal Philharmonic Society Music Award.

Biography

[edit]

Balch was born and raised in San Diego.[2][3] She obtained her bachelor's degree from Tufts University and the New England Conservatory of Music and her master's degree from Yale School of Music.[4] In 2022, she obtained her doctorate of musical arts from Columbia University; her doctoral dissertation Liminal Spaces: Sonic Ecologies within and around the Music of Erin Gee was supervised by George E. Lewis.[4][1]

She was the 2014-2015 Collage New Music Fellow,[5] and she won an ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Award.[6] She was the California Symphony Young American Composer-in-Residence from 2017 to 2020 (the first woman to hold the position),[7] as well as Young Concert Artists' William B. Butz Composition Chair from 2017 to 2019.[4]

By 2017, Balch had worked as a composer with such classical music ensembles as Albany Symphony Orchestra, FLUX Quartet, and International Contemporary Ensemble.[3] In May 2019, she debuted her concerto Artifacts at the Lesher Center for the Arts in Walnut Creek, California; Joshua Kosman said of the concerto that "she's like some kind of musical Thomas Edison — you can just hear her tinkering around in her workshop, putting together new sounds and textural ideas".[8] She won the American Academy in Rome's 2020 Elliott Carter Rome Prize.[9] She composed "Apartment Sounds" for Yvonne Lam's 2023 album Watch Over Us; American Record Guide called Balch "welcome purveyor of timbral variety in Apartment Sounds, as the recorded materials included in this short piece are relatively refreshing.[10]

Her piece Forgetting was performed at the Song Company's March 2024 Superbloom production at the Sydney Opera House; Peter McCallum of WAtoday said it "began with stopped utterances and sounds in a state of almost silent inarticulateness and hesitancy".[11] Manfred Honeck conducted her piece musica pyralis at the New York Philharmonic in April 2024; Oussama Zahr called the piece "a study in shifting atmospheres, wispy, mysterious and fleeting".[12] Balch's commissioned piece for the Manchester Collective involved the use of text from Virginia Woolf's essay A Room of One's Own, where Andrew Clements said that Balch "found a connection between Rothko and Feldman and her own music in Virginia Woolf".[13]

In 2025, Balch won the Royal Philharmonic Society Music Award in Large-Scale Composition for her work Whisper Concerto (stylized in lower-case).[14][15] The same year, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Music Composition.[16]

She worked as an adjunct professor at Jacobs School of Music during the 2021-2022 academic year.[17] In 2022, she taught composition as part of the faculty of the Peabody Institute.[18] She later returned to Yale School of Music as assistant professor of composition.[4] She also worked at Mannes School of Music and The Walden School.[19][4]

Balch lives in Bethany, Connecticut.[20]

References

[edit]
  1. ^ a b "Dr. Katherine Elise Balch defends dissertation". music.columbia.edu. Retrieved June 11, 2025.
  2. ^ Nordlinger, Jay (2024). "New York chronicle". The New Criterion. Vol. 42, no. 10. p. 147-161. ProQuest 3065044117.
  3. ^ a b Rowe, Georgia (March 16, 2017). "BALCH CHOSEN CAL SYMPH COMPOSER".   The Mercury News. p. T24. ProQuest 1878188279.
  4. ^ a b c d e "Katherine Balch". Yale School of Music. Retrieved June 9, 2025.
  5. ^ "Past Collage Fellows". Collage New Music. Retrieved June 11, 2025.
  6. ^ "2014 ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Awards Announced". New Music USA. April 1, 2014. Retrieved June 11, 2025.
  7. ^ "Composer-in-Residence Katherine Balch on Cuckoo Clocks, California, and Composing in Color". California Symphony. April 16, 2018. Retrieved June 11, 2025.
  8. ^ Kosman, Joshua (May 6, 2019). "Review: Katherine Balch doesn't think a concerto is just for the soloist". San Francisco Chronicle. Retrieved June 9, 2025.
  9. ^ "New Rome Prize Winners and Italian Fellows". American Academy in Rome. July 22, 2020. Retrieved June 10, 2025.
  10. ^ "The Newest Music". American Record Guide. Vol. 86, no. 6. 2023. p. 171-174. ProQuest 2881922883.
  11. ^ Shand, John; Ruffles, Michael (March 7, 2024). "The Human League put on a classic retro show – but it's all about that one song". WAtoday. ProQuest 3063781667.
  12. ^ Zahr, Oussama (April 14, 2024). "Review: Under Manfred Honeck, the Philharmonic Becomes One: Critic's Pick". New York Times. ProQuest 3038097583.
  13. ^ Clements, Andrew (May 6, 2024). "Sansara/Manchester Collective review – an exquisitely colourful tribute to Rothko Chapel". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved June 10, 2025.
  14. ^ "Large-Scale Composition". Royal Philharmonic Society. Retrieved June 9, 2025.
  15. ^ Morley, Christopher (March 13, 2025). "Conductor Yamada honoured as awards leave London behind". Birmingham Post. p. 24. ProQuest 3176455657.
  16. ^ "Announcing the 2025 Guggenheim Fellows". Guggenheim Fellowships. April 15, 2025. Retrieved June 9, 2025.
  17. ^ "Bulletin 2021-2022". Jacobs School of Music. Retrieved June 9, 2025.
  18. ^ "Katherine Balch Joins Composition Faculty for Spring 2022 Semester". The Peabody Post. Johns Hopkins University. July 28, 2021. Retrieved June 9, 2025.
  19. ^ "PSNY: Katherine Balch Biography". European American Music Distributors Company. Retrieved June 9, 2025.
  20. ^ "EAM: Katherine Balch - Country Radio". European American Music Distributors Company. Retrieved June 11, 2025.
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