Ingram Marshall

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Ingram Marshall (Courtesy of the Artist)

Ingram Marshall, composer, lived and worked in the San Francisco Bay Area from 1973 to 1985 and in Washington State, where he taught at Evergreen State College, until 1989. His current base is Connecticut. He studied at Columbia University and California Institute of the Arts, where he received an M.F.A., and has been a student of Indonesian gamelan music, the influence of which may be heard in the slowed-down sense of time and use of melodic repetition found in many of his pieces. In the mid-seventies he developed a series of “live electronic” pieces such as Fragility Cycles, Gradual Requiem, and Alcatraz in which he blended tape collages, extended vocal techniques, Indonesian flutes, and keyboards.

He performed widely in the United States and Europe with these works. In recent years he has concentrated on music combining tape and electronic processing with ensembles and soloists. His music has been performed by ensembles and orchestras such as the Theater of Voices, Kronos Quartet, Bang on a Can All-Stars, Los Angeles Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, St. Louis Symphony, and American Composers Orchestra. He has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Rockefeller Foundation, Fromm Foundation, Guggenheim Foundation, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Recent recordings are on Nonesuch (Kingdom Come) and New Albion (Savage Altars). Among recent chamber works are Muddy Waters, which was commissioned and performed by the Bang on a Can All-Stars, and In Deserto (Smoke Creek), commissioned by Chamber Music America for the ensemble Clogs. January 2004 saw the premiere of Bright Kingdoms, commissioned by Magnum Opus/Meet the Composer, and performed by the Oakland-East Bay Symphony under Michael Morgan. The American Composers Orchestra in New York premiered his new concerto for two guitars and orchestra, Dark Florescence, at Carnegie Hall in February 2005. Orphic Memories, commissioned by the Cheswatyr Foundation, was composed for the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra and premiered in Carnegie Hall in April 2007