Bio

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still of A Downward Gape Into Mellifluous Structures of Light’s vibrating subwoofer milk

American immersive theater composer and artistic researcher Emerson Voss (b. 1991) pursues one question from two directions: how relational structures — domestic, institutional, public — shape collective life. His site-specific, multimedia installations and staged music theater works dramatize everyday mundanities through music and field recordings, video and lighting, narrative and performance, scent and touch, while his scholarly writing analyzes publicly funded institutionally critical Norwegian theater and the political tensions these works incite, respond to, and clarify.

Emerson has been invited as an artist fellow to Yaddo, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, São Paulo Contemporary Composers Festival, New Music On The Point, Bunker Projects, Wintergreen Composers Retreat, and Snow Pond Composers Workshop. His artistic and scholarly work has been supported by the Irma Freeman Center for Imagination as well as the University of Pittsburgh's Physics and Astronomy Department, Nationality Room Scholarship, and Whittington Leadership and Innovation Challenge. His scholarly work towards a journal article for Music & Politics has been presented at conferences in Seoul and Lucca and in guest lectures at the Norwegian Academy of Music in Oslo. His installation cycle Every Room Speaks pairs common rooms in our homes with the kinds of speech they invite; its first installation, A Poetic of Space (set in a bathroom), has premiered in Oslo, Norway; in Novi Sad, Serbia for the international new media arts festival Videomedeja; and in Riga, Latvia for the Second International Scent Art Festival. His chamber and solo works have been performed by the JACK Quartet, Duo Cortona, TAK Ensemble, Da Capo Chamber Players, Dior Quartet, The Boston New Music Initiative, Michael Lowenstern, Miranda Cuckson, Steven Beck, and Julia Den Boer, among others.

Emerson received a PhD in Music Composition and Theory from the University of Pittsburgh, an MM in Composition and Theory from East Carolina University, and a BA in Music Composition and Theory from Campbell University. He is currently Lecturer in the Department of Music at the University of Pittsburgh. He is originally from Raleigh, North Carolina and is now based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.