Kathleen Tagg: Based in New York since 2001, the South African pianist, composer and producer has performed on four continents, and is becoming known for her distinctive sound that mixes acoustic and electronic sounds, loops, samples and extended techniques, as well as for her innovative, quirky and deeply personal body of work, performed and commissioned by leading artists, ensembles and festivals.

She is equally at home in a concert hall performing with an array of leading instrumentalists and singers, in a club with her loops and samples, writing for her own projects and collaborations, completing commissions for individual artists or symphony orchestras, creating narrative immersive interdisciplinary performance works or writing for film and theater. All of her projects reflect her strong desire to connect as a human being first and foremost, and to constantly engage with the world around her. She is co-artistic director of Table Pounding Music with David Krakauer, a platform for a wide range of projects, recordings and socially focused benefit events.

She has performed at venues such as Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, the 92nd St Y and Symphony Space in New York, the Pierre Boulez Saal in Berlin and Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris, but equally revels in performing in non-conventional spaces, clubs and theatres. Her performances and numerous recordings range from classical to world music, musical theater to her own music mixing improvisation with fully realized scores. Tagg has performed throughout North America, Europe, Southern Africa, China and India and her recordings have been featured in film and television. Her work has focused on identity, ideas of connection and sound exploration.

She received commissions to write for the Cape Town Philharmonic Orchestra and the Marine Band of the Royal Netherlands Navy and to arrange work for the New Century Chamber Orchestra and Vienna Jewish Culture Fest. She co-composed and produced her first film score with David Krakauer for Eric Steel’s feature film Minyan, which showed in February 2020 at the Berlin Biennale, and which subsequently won the grand jury prize at OutFest 2020. Her musical, Erika’s Wall, co-written with Sophie Jaff, received a developmental production by The Music Theater Company of Chicago. She was a 2014-2015 fellow of the Dramatist Guild of America and a 2017 Con Edison Exploring the Metropolis Composer in Residence.

Since 2012, she has toured internationally with David Krakauer in acoustic and electric configurations. Their unique programs live at the intersection of classical, world music and jazz, and often incorporate loops, samples, sound design and visual elements. Recent co-composed works include an evening-length collaborative work called Keepers of the Flame with musicians from Syria, Ukraine and Poland which was commissioned by the Center for International Dialogue at the Borderlands Foundation in Poland. In 2019 they created a concert-length fully immersive audio-visual surround-sound concert/art installation with video designer Jesse Gilbert for the Pierre Boulez Saal in Berlin, with Kathleen acting as co-creator and producer.

Tagg has produced all of her own albums- from classical and classical-crossover albums to her 2016 album Where Worlds Collide with South African jazz pianist Andre Petersen. On the 2020 Breath & Hammer album with Krakauer, she has created an album out of tens of thousands of samples of her and Krakauer’s playing. She has produced countless events, including a series of benefit concerts for the ACLU featuring luminaries such as Abraham Inc, Marc Ribot and members of the Silk Road Ensemble. She organizes with the Music Workers Alliance (www.musicworkersalliance.org).

Kathleen is a graduate of the Manhattan School of Music, (which awarded her the Helen Cohn Award as outstanding Doctoral Graduate), Mannes College the New School (MM) and the University of Cape Town, and her principle teachers were Nina Svetlanova, Graham Fitch, Lamar Crowson and Claudine van Breda. She is also indebted to all her teachers in harmony, counterpoint and orchestration (in particular Shirley Gie at UCT); her cello, chamber and orchestra instructors, as well as her incredible collaborators who taught her so much.

Based in New York since 2001, South African-born pianist, composer and producer Kathleen Tagg has performed on four continents in leading venues such as Carnegie Hall, had her original music performed in venues such as New York’s Lincoln Center, appeared on a host of recordings of classical, world music and multi-genre recordings and produced numerous recordings and inter-disciplinary programs from Cape Town to Los Angeles. She has created her own unique language at the piano, made up of techniques she developed and experimented with to expand the piano into a full electro - acoustic orchestra. Her work has been released on record labels NAXOS, Ossia Records, Table Pounding Records and Gallo Africa, and she has been praised for her combining of “outstanding technique with deep musicality”. A 2014 South African Music Awards nominee for best classical or instrumental album, she has performed in concert with some of the world’s leading musicians, and the remarkable breadth of her collaborations defines her multi-faceted career. Read More

Kathleen has written for the stage, concert hall and film as well as for site-specific performances. She wrote the score to the 2020 film Minyan with David Krakauer (Nominated for the Best feature at the Berlin Film Festival and winner: Best Narrative Film at OutFest 2020).
Commissions include the Cape Town Philharmonic Orchestra, soprano Golda Schultz & pianist Jonathan Ware and co-commissions with David Krakauer by the Santa Rosa Symphony, Eugene Symphony and The Adele and John Gray Endowment Fund as well as for the Marine Band of the Royal Netherlands Navy. She has created arrangements for the New Century Chamber Orchestra, Vienna Jewish Culture Fest and Krakauer’s album and show The Big Picture. The launch of her electro-acoustic Breath & Hammer project with David Krakauer at National Sawdust in early 2016 was the start of a project that has toured widely on four continents. In 2017, she and David Krakauer created Keepers of the Flame, an evening-length theatrical music event for the Borderlands Foundations’ annual Misterium Mostu Festival (Mystery of the Bridge). In 2019 she and David Krakauer created a concert-length immersive concert experience, Breath & Hammer: The Ties that Bind Us for the Pierre Boulez Saal in Berlin with video artist Jesse Gilbert, with Kathleen acting as co-creator and producer. In the past decade, her work has focused more and more on identity, ideas of connection and sound exploration. She was a fellow of the Dramatist Guild for her music Erika’s Wall with Sophie Jaff, and a 2017 Con Edison Exploring the Metropolis Composer in Residence.  Read More

As a producer, Kathleen has produced all of her albums- from classical and classical-crossover albums to her 2016 album Where Worlds Collide with South African jazz pianist Andre Petersen and her genre-defying album 2020 album Breath & Hammer with David Krakauer. On the Breath & Hammer album with Krakauer, she has created what Krakauer refers to as “a medieval tapestry the size of an apartment, made up of fingernail sized samples”. She also produced countless events and series, including the New Sounds Africa series in New York in 2014 and following on from her two decades of work with classical singers, she created and curated a series of concerts celebrating new works for SongFest at Colburn in LA from 2014-2016. In 2017, she co-produced a series of benefit concerts for the ACLU at Symphony Space in New York featuring leading artists. She is co-director of Table Pounding Music. Read More