Andrew A. Watts is a composer of chamber, symphonic, multimedia, and electro-acoustic works regularly performed throughout North America, South America, Europe, and Asia. His compositions have been premiered at world-renowned venues and cultural events; his multimedia installation Corpus Clock was featured at Burning Man, while works like What it means to be post human have been presented at The Kitchen in New York City. He has written works for many of the top new music groups today including Ensemble Dal Niente, Ekmeles Vocal Ensemble, Proton Bern, Distractfold Ensemble, RAGE Thormbones, Splinter Reeds, Quince Vocal Ensemble, Line Upon Line Percussion, the Mivos Quartet, as well as members of the International Contemporary Ensemble, Elision Ensemble, Talea Ensemble, and Schallfeld. Recently, Watts has premiered several large-scale multimedia works, including the 45-minute AI and the Heat Death of the Universe and A Strobe Fractures Obsidian Night, an open instrumentation quartet that utilizes AI-generated video and multichannel audio. He is currently working on a new electro-acoustic work for the [Switch~] Ensemble, a commission supported by New Music USA's Creator Fund.
He completed his doctorate at Stanford University, studying with Brian Ferneyhough, Chris Chafe, and Jaroslaw Kapuscinski. Watts received his master's with distinction from Oxford University and his bachelor's with academic honors from the New England Conservatory. Watts’s music mines the expressive and dramatic ramifications of technology and the post-human. His research examines the compositional applications of language desemanticization, focusing on the ability to convey expression through the voice even when specific meaning is lost, augmented, or otherwise unintelligible. His writing also actively explores musical extremes through gradients of freedom and restriction, ambiguity and detail, purity and distortion, or the very distinction between musical signal and noise. Often, he includes invented instruments to broaden the palette of what a performer can do. Watts has sought to create highly precise surface gestures to serve as the impetus in his music. He exercises a great degree of control over nuanced parameters, creating systems to model dramatic real-world behaviors and relations.
Watts is currently on the Music Composition faculty at the University of California Santa Barbara’s College of Creative Studies where he has been a finalist for the university's Distinguished Teaching Award. At UCSB he is also an affiliate faculty in the Mellichamp Initiative in Mind & Machine Intelligence. From 2017 to 2022, he co-taught the summer workshop “Algorithmic Composition with Max/MSP and OpenMusic” at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA). He has been a featured composer at many renowned international festivals such as the Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music, MATA Festival (NYC), impuls Academy (Austria), Ostrava Days, and the Wellesley Composers Conference. Furthermore, he has given guest lectures on his compositional practice and various special topics in contemporary music at IRCAM, Harvard University, UC Berkeley, UC San Diego, McGill University, CalArts, Ithaca College, and other leading music programs. Lastly, from 2018 to 2019, he co-hosted the interview series Composer OverTime featuring discussions and works by innovative composers across the world today.
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