BIOGRAPHY

Andrew Waggoner was born in 1960 in New Orleans. He grew up there and in Minneapolis and Atlanta, and studied at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, the Eastman School of Music and Cornell University.  Called “the gifted practitioner of a complex but dramatic and vividly colored style” by the New Yorker, his music has been commissioned and performed by the the Academy of St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields; the Los Angeles Philharmonic; the Saint Louis, Denver, Syracuse, and Winnipeg Symphonies, and the Bohuslav Martinu Philharmonic of Zlin, Czech Republic; the Corigliano, Miro, Villiers, Lark, JACK, Ciompi, and Lydian Quartets; the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble; the California EAR Unit; pianists Gloria Cheng and Molly Morkoski; violist Melia Watras; Sequitur; the Empyrean Ensemble; Dinosaur Annex; Flexible Music; Peggy Pearson and Winsor Music; Duo Cortona; Seattle Modern Orchestra; Tanglewood; Ekmeles; Ensemble Nordlys, and the Rudersdal Kammersolister, of Denmark; and Ensemble Accroche Note, of France.

In 2009 he received an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has also received grants and prizes from ASCAP, Yaddo, The New York State Council on the Arts, Meet the Composer, and New Music Delaware.. Other awards include the Lee Ettelson prize from Composers Inc.; a Guggenheim Fellowship; the Roger Sessions Prize from the Liguria Study Center in Bogliasco, Italy; second-prize in the Lydian String Quartet/Brandeis University Composition Competition; and a Fromm Foundation commission for his 5th Quartet, composed for the Lydian.

His latest solo disc, Quantum Memoir, concertos for guitar, piano, and violin, was released on Bridge Records in August of 2019, about which MusicWeb International wrote “Waggoner is indubitably his own man, and in these compact pieces conjures music of astonishing and unexpected depth, precision and sophistication”. His CD of chamber music and improvisations from Albany Records, Terror and Memory, was released in 2011 to broad critical acclaim. His work is also available on CRI/New World; Vienna Modern Masters; Centaur; and Fleur de Son. In addition to his concert works, Waggoner has also composed extensively for theatre and for film, and is an active violinist. He was a founding Director of the Seal Bay Festival of American Music in Vinalhaven, Maine, and is currently Co-Artistic Director, with his wife, cellist Caroline Stinson, of the Catskills-based Weekend of Chamber Music. He currently teaches composition and improvisation at Duke University. His music is available through Subito Music.