Amy Beth Kirsten (born 1972)
Amy Beth Kirsten grew up in the suburbs of Kansas City and Chicago. She received an MM from Roosevelt University and a DMA from the Peabody Institute. She has taught at Bard College and the Curtis Institute of Music.
Her website states:
Amy Beth Kirsten’s musical and conceptual language is characterized by an abiding interest in exploring theatrical elements of creation, performance, and presentation. Her body of work fuses music, language, voice, and theatre and often considers musicians’ instruments, bodies, and voices as equal vehicles of expression.
Amy Beth Kirsten’s instrumental textures are often light and sparse, and her instrumentalists are often called upon the sing or vocalize. These characteristics are both evident in her 2013 work spun for cello and piano.
In the program note to the score, she calls this work a “miniature-song cycle” that uses her own texts as well as a poem by Emily Dickinson “woven together in a kind of musical web: each movement begins with material that ends the preceding movement, forming a web that eventually comes back to the beginning.”