“Kari Watson’s music has bite as well as poetry. The composer speaks their own language between surreal-synthetic sound worlds and radio-play-like collage.” – Excerpt from the jury statement for the Kranichstein Music Prize 2023.

About Me:

Kari Watson (they/them) is a composer, performer, and sound artist working between the mediums of contemporary concert music, electroacoustic music, live performance, and interactive installation work.

Their work has been commissioned, performed and recorded in the United States and abroad by several ensembles and musicians, most recently, Yarn/Wire, Collective Lovemusic, Ensemble Dal Niente, TAK Ensemble, the MIVOS Quartet, Line Upon Line, the Chicago Philharmonic, Quatuor Diotima, Ekmeles Vocal Ensemble, and Sandbox Percussion, among others.

Watson’s work has also been featured on a variety of concerts and festivals. Most recently, at the 2024 Donaueschinger MusikTage, the Composers Now Dialogues Series with Tania León, the Darmstädter Ferienkurse, the Ravinia Festival’s Breaking Barriers Festival with Marin Alsop, Les Écoles D’art Américaines de Fontainebleau, Chicago's Frequency Festival, the Ear Taxi Festival, and at the New Music Gathering.

As a performer playing analog synthesizers, they engage a customizable spatialization software built in MaxMSP with spatial speaker arrays to further explore issues of tactility and drama in immersive sonic environments. Watson plays modular synthesizers as a soloist and as one half of a duo project with cellist Katinka Kleijn with a forthcoming release on elektramusic (DE) in summer, 2025.

Recent performances include premiering their new work OSCILLATIONS for large ensemble, modular synthesizer, and electronics with Chicago’s Grossman Ensemble under Conductor David Fulmer, a Modular Synthesizer Duo Tour with Composer/Conductor/Synthesist Aaron Holloway-Nahum (UK), a duo set with Katinka Kleijn at KM28 in Berlin (September, 2024), and the premier of TETHER, an hour long performance piece for 3 modular synthesizers, dancer and live projections on Frequency Festival at Constellation, Chicago (December, 2023) and Epiphany Center for the Arts (October, 2024).

Recently featured by Musical America as their New Artist of the Month (February, 2025), Watson has received several awards and distinctions for their work such as the 2023 Kranichstein Music Prize for Composition from the Darmstädter Ferienkurse, the 2023 Nerenberg, Gerts and Hammond Prize from the Musicians Club of Women, a 2022 Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a 2022 Student Composer Award from Broadcast Music Industry. 

Their debut album, enclosures, was recently released with Sawyer Editions (TX) and has since been listed in the Best Contemporary Classical Music on Bandcamp, January 2025, by Peter Margasak for Bandcamp Daily. Words about Watson’s music have appeared in several publications such as The Wire, Tempo Magazine, and The Washington Post.

Watson holds a BM from Oberlin Conservatory in Composition, with a minor in TIMARA (technology in music and related arts) and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. at the University of Chicago on a full fellowship from the Division of the Humanities.

Portrait by Ashleigh Dye