Alexandra Gardner

Alexandra Gardner (born 1967) is an American contemporary composer based in Baltimore, Maryland. Her music employs diverse acoustic instrumentation and electronics, drawing on minimalist and modernist influences as well as extra-musical sources and sounds. Critics note her work for its blend of contemplative and expressive qualities, clear structure and unexpected evolution, and complex rhythms. In a 2007 New Yorker essay, music critic Alex Ross placed Gardner among a "vital group of composers" creating a "new kind of interstitial music" that blurs genre boundaries.

Gardner's work has been performed in solo, chamber and orchestral contexts and as scoring for dance, theater and visual art performances, at venues including Kennedy Center, Aspen Music Festival, Centro de Cultura Contemporania de Barcelona, Strathmore Music Center and Symphony Space, among others. Gardner's music is recorded on the Innova, Ars Harmonica, and Naxos labels.

Early life and career Alexandra Gardner was born in 1967 and raised in Washington, DC. She studied percussion (focusing on marimba), composition and electronic music with Charles Barbour, Annea Lockwood and Richard Edward Wilson at Vassar College.

In 1993, she enrolled at CalArts, where she studied with Morton Subotnick and explored Afro-Cuban and Ghanaian percussion in performance outside of school.

Composing Gardner's compositions often combine acoustic instrumentation and electronic music created from organic sound sources and field recordings; Gardner employs an intuitive process, experimenting with a wide range of unfolding ideas and textures that are ultimately organized through disciplined formal constructions. The composition "Marblehead" (1992)—commissioned for a dance whose props included a chair and a large bowl of marbles—was created entirely from sampled sounds of marbles clicking and rolling; in a review of the work's later performance, Cleveland's The Plain Dealer described it as "amusing taped study in rhythm and percussive sonorities." Gardner composed three other works on the CD, among others, for choreographer Sharon Mansur: "Waterborne," "Shifting Sands" and "Framework". Her later work, "Bloom" (2009, cello and electronics), was used as a score by Ballet San Antonio in 2015.

Solo and duo works In the 2000s, Gardner often focused on solo and duo compositions, some written for visiting soloists while she was composer-in-residence at the Institut Universitari de l’audiovisual/Phonos Foundation in Barcelona from 2002 to 2004. Reviews describe its music as exhibiting clear compositional structures and accessible rhythms, expressivity in both solo lines and electroacoustic textures, and a fluid dynamic between those two modes, ranging from often indistinguishable samplings, expansions and variations on the soloist sounds to open, confrontational dialogues. "New Skin" (2004), a meditative, slightly improvisatory work contrasting alto flute and processed percussion sounds;

Chamber music Gardner's first widely recognized chamber music compositions were written in the late 1990s after her graduate studies. "Migrations" (1997) was composed for the Aspen Contemporary Ensemble while Gardner attended the Aspen Music Festival and School on scholarship. Inspired by ideas involving both migrating birds and molecules, it employs small step-wise, expansive instrumental movements and a single dramatic shift. San Antonio Express-News critic Mike Greenberg described it as thoughtful, compact and "harmonically … fresh and surprising, but always accessible," comparing its ordered unfolding of ideas through drones and sustained chords to the work of Pauline Oliveros and its textural "flutters and chirps" to Olivier Messiaen's work. Gardner created "The Way of Ideas" (2007) for the Seattle Chamber Players to perform at the Icebreaker contemporary music festival, organized by Alex Ross in 2008. Inspired by a line in Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass about how thoughts become reality, the work has been described as both well-structured and open to random ideas, with a succession of linked, cheerful instrumental motifs with an undercurrent of melancholy. Based on her interest in geological events, she created "Vixen," a composition named for and structured around the unique eruption pattern of one of the park's geysers.

Orchestral and large ensemble works In the 2010s, Gardner has been commissioned to write several orchestral and large ensemble works, including two percussion-oriented works for the Seattle Symphony (SSO).

She wrote "Just Say Yes" (2012) for Alan White, drummer of the band Yes, as part of the SSO's "Sonic Evolution" project. As I Am, Kate Amrine, Self-produced (2018) – "Ituri," Musica, por un tiempo, Soli Chamber Ensemble, Naxos (2014) – "Crows" Obres per a Trombó I Electronica, Carlos Gil Ferrer, Ars Harmonica (2007) – "Snapdragon" Marblehead: Electronic Music 1990-2000, Alexandra Gardner, Self-produced (2000) – "Marblehead", "Excavation," "Waterborne," "Picking Up," "Shifting Sands," "Framework," "Sleeping Weather"