Elizabeth Ogonek, born in the United States in 1989, is a composer who specialises in orchestral music sustained by her sonic imagination and gift for inventing shimmering and glittering textures.
In common with many other American composers, she has absorbed the influences of minimalism, whose legacy can be felt in multiple animated sound surfaces and above all in her effortless combination of consonance and dissonance.
Ogonek grew up in New York, where she received her basic musical education. She studied Composition at several American universities as well as with Julian Anderson at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London. In 2015, Ogonek started teaching at Oberlin Conservatory, where she has since been appointed to a professorship. She also teaches Composition at Cornell University, New York.
Ogonek has already enjoyed two long-term collaborations with leading international orchestras, as Mead Composer-in-Residence with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, for which she wrote both orchestral and ensemble works, and with the London Symphony Orchestra, which performed the world premieres of two works commissioned from her at the Barbican Centre conducted by Francois-Xavier Roth. In 2022, a composing commission initiated a new working relationship with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and its Chief Conductor Andris Nelsons.
As of June 2023.