Alexander Sigman

Born 1980 in Ringoes, NJ/USA.

Alexander Sigman is currently writing his dissertation in Music Composition at Stanford University, having studied primarily with Brian Ferneyhough. He has pursued further postgraduate studies with Chaya Czernowin at the University for Music and Performing Arts, Vienna (2007), and attended the one-year intensive course of the Institute of Sonology at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague/Netherlands during 2007/2008. Prior to Stanford, Sigman obtained a BM in Music Composition and a BA in Cognitive Sciences from Rice University.

His work has been performed at the Centre Acanthes, June in Buffalo, the Darmstädter Ferienkurse, the Abbaye de Royaumont, the Wellesley Composers Conference, the Society of Composers (SCI) National Conference, and Klangraum Festival in Stuttgart, among others.

His music has been performed throughout Europe and the US by such ensembles as the Arditti Quartet, les Percussions de Strasbourg, the Ensembles SurPlus, Inauthentica, and Ascolta, as well as soloists such as Magnus Andersson, Jean Kopperud, Eliot Gattegno, and Françoise Rivalland.

Sigman’s electroacoustic, film, and multi-media compositions have been featured on programs at the Institute of Sonology in The Hague, DNK-Amsterdam, International Computer Music Conference (ICMC), the Sonorities Festival in Belfast, and the In-Sonora Muestra in Madrid, among others.

Since his undergraduate studies, Sigman has received several commissions, awards and grants, including the American Composers’ Forum Encore grant, the Bearns Prize, a Fulbright scholarship to the Netherlands, a Julius F. Jezek commission prize nomination, as well as awards from ASCAP. In June 2007, he was composer-in-residence at the Musiques Démesurées festival in Clermont-Ferrand/France.

Sigman has also authored and presented several articles and papers, including a book chapter on music and aesthetics to be published in an anthology edited by Steven Takasugi and a study of early Schönberg-Lieder. Since 2007, Sigman has been co-editor of the Search Journal for New Music and Culture and managing director of the 12-member Dutch ensemble Modelo62.