COMPOSER

Kathleen Tagg is a New York-based composer, pianist and producer from South Africa. Her work has been heard in major venues and festivals on five continents, and commissions have included the Santa Rosa and Eugene Symphony Orchestras, Cape Philharmonic Orchestra, New Century Chamber Orchestra, Royal Netherlands Marine band, Stellenbosch International Chamber Music Festival and more. 

Recent commissions include a concerto The Fretless Clarinet: Concerto for klezmer clarinet and orchestra, co-composed with David Krakauer and performed by the Santa Rosa and Eugene Symphonies, Orchestre de la Nouvelle-Aquitaine at the Paris Philharmonie, Sinfonia Varsovia and Orchestra National de Bretagne, a song cycle, This Be Her Verse (commissioned by and for soprano Golda Schultz and pianist Jonathan Ware to words by Lila Palmer) and heard at the Lucerne Festival, Festival D'Aix-en-Provence; Kölner Philharmonie; Melbourne Opera House, amongst others, as well as a new work for the Stellenbosch International Chamber Music Festival, In His Words: Please Dream featuring the voice and words of the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Additional major new productions include the co-creation of Mazel Tov Cocktail Party, a genre-bending project celebrating shared humanity that has been heard in halls, clubs and festivals across Europe and in the USA, including Paris’ Théâtre du Châtelet and the USA’s Princeton Festival.

Kathleen’s output is becoming increasingly hard to categorize: the South African native, New York-based Tagg alternates between performing on major concert series and creating new works and inter-disciplinary programs using loops, samples and visual mediums. 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.

With long-time collaborator David Krakauer, she co-composed and produced the musical score for the feature film Minyan by Eric Steel, (nominated for best film at 2020 Berlin Film Festival & Winner of Grand Jury Prize for Best U.S. Narrative Feature at OUTFEST 2020). They also co-wrote a concert fantasy for the Marine band of the Royal Netherlands Navy. The launch of her electro-acoustic Breath & Hammer project with Krakauer in 2016 was the start of an ever-evolving project that has toured widely on four continents. This project features original works by Kathleen, as well as her arrangements for a “piano orchestra” made up of thousands of tiny samples made up from the whole body of the piano- all wooven together into a giant tapestry. In 2017, she and David Krakauer created an evening-length theatrical music event for the Borderlands Foundations’ annual Misterium Mostu festival (Mystery of the Bridge). In 2019, they created an immersive evening-length work for the Pierre Boulez Saal in Berlin (The Ties that Bind Us) with video artist Jesse Gilbert.

Other large-scale works include pieces for the Marine Band of the Royal Netherlands Navy (with Krakauer), Cape Philharmonic Orchestra, and arrangements for New Century Chamber Orchestra and Vienna Jewish Culture Fest. Her musical, Erika’s Wall, created with Sophie Jaff, received a developmental production by The Music Theater Company, Chicago, under the direction of Jessica Redish. In the past decade, her work has focused more and more on identity, ideas of connection and sound exploration. She has been prolific as a songwriter over the past decade, but has also written for combinations as diverse as symphony orchestra (including a commission from the Cape Town Symphony Orchestra/ Suidoosterfees), choir, string quartet, piano with electronics and six-piece band. She has been active from New York to Johannesburg, Beijing to Kolkata, Berlin to Warsaw. 

She has performed around the world with artists from very different genres and disciplines, and is becoming known for her bold collaborations and her distinctive sound that mixes together acoustic and electronic sounds, loops, samples and extended techniques she developed. She is equally at home performing in major concert halls such as Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center or in alternative arts spaces, fulfilling commissions for leading artists and ensembles, writing for her own projects and collaborations, 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. 

Her recorded work appears on Table Pounding Records, NAXOS, Alpha Classics, Ossia Records, Label Bleu, and she is a member of ASCAP, the Dramatist Guild, Recording Academy and Chamber Music America, and is a former steering committee member of the Music Workers Alliance. Her work in artistic dialogue includes residencies at Poland’s Borderlands Foundations and WITS School of the Arts, Johannesburg. She was a 2014-15 fellow of the Dramatist Guild of America, a 2017 Con Ed Exploring the Metropolis Composer in Residence and inaugural artist-in-residence at Brown Arts Initiative. She spent a month at WITS University in Johannesburg as part of a residency working with composition students to create new, collaborative works and performances. Kathleen also recorded three of her original compositions for the album Where Worlds Collide with South African jazz pianist Andre Petersen (released 2016) and on the 2020 album Breath & Hammer with David Krakauer.

Kathleen is a member of ASCAP, and her works are published by Spotted Kat Music (ASCAP).

“Tagg’s inventive, magical appropriation of musical atmosphere made this one of the highlights of the programme… her setting of De Falla’s Nana displaying the full extent of her provocative musical imagination” - CUE Magazine

OLDER PROJECTS:

Kathleen’s work includes the full-length Afrikaans alt-cabaret Spieël Speel, co-created with South Africa singer Zanne Stapelberg, which premiered in July 2013 with a multi-city South African tour. The show features all-new original songs by Tagg as well as songs by Tagg and Stapelberg- with lyrics by Afrikaans luminaries such as Hennie Aucamp, Elizabeth Eybers, Deon Meyer, Antjie Krog and Willem de Vries. The works are for a six-piece ensemble of voice, piano, violin, guitar, bass & percussion. Her Orchestrated Songs of Heartbreak, written with Sophie Jaff, have been heard at venues such as New York’s Lincoln Center, while songs from their evening-long collection of songs “Apple Heart” have been heard at the Music Theatre Company in Chicago, and the Duplex and Gershwin Hotel in New York. 

The 2012 show Soul of Fire featured arrangements by Kathleen for 5-piece ensemble, and was also released as a CD of the same name. Kathleen acted as the pianist, music director and producer on the recording, which was nominated for a 2014 South African Music Award (SAMA) in the category ‘Best classical or instrumental album’. Kathleen’s arrangement of Nana was included in Deon Meyer’s 2013 film Die Laaste Tango, as well as being released on the film’s official soundtrack on Gallo Records and other tracks have been used for South African TV.

Piano Circus is the umbrella for Kathleen’s solo works. She continues to work on redefining a new sound for the piano by writing new work for piano (using both the inside and outside), combining them with electronics- as well as commissioning new works by composers she loves. Her sound world draws on her native South Africa as well as her years spent in New York.