Department of Music

Biography

Ted Coffey makes acoustic and electronic music, sound installations, and songs. His work has been presented in concerts and festivals across North America, Europe and Asia, at such venues as Judson Church, The Knitting Factory, Roulette, Symphony Space, and Lincoln Center (NYC), The Lab, New Langton Arts, Zellerbach Hall, and The Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (SF), Wolf Trap and The Kennedy Center (DC), the Korean National University of the Arts (Seoul), The Carre Theatre (Amsterdam), and ZKM (Karlsruhe, Germany). He studied composition with Jon Appleton, Christian Wolff, Pauline Oliveros, and Paul Lansky, among others, receiving degrees in music from Dartmouth (AB), Mills College (MFA) and Princeton (MFA, PhD). Since 2011, Coffey has collaborated with the Bill T. Jones / Arnie Zane Dance Company on several projects, including the evening-length work Story/Time, which he toured widely with the Company. Other dance projects include works made with Abigail Levine, Paul Matteson, and Jennifer Nugent. Coffey is active in national and international academic communities associated with music and technology, and currently serves as President of the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States (SEAMUS). His writings on aesthetics and politics in the performing arts have been honored with significant awards from the Josephine De Kármán and Andrew C. Mellon Foundations. Recordings of his work are available on the Ellipsis Arts, Everglade, Innova, Audition Records, SEAMUS, crackletimesfavor, EcoSono, and Ravello labels. Coffey is currently a College Fellow and Professor in Composition and Computer Technologies at the University of Virginia, where he teaches courses in composition, music technologies, music aesthetics, and pop.