Kati Ilona Agócs (born January 20, 1975) is a Canadian-American composer and a member of the composition faculty at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, Massachusetts.
Agócs attended the Juilliard School in New York where she earned a Master's and Doctoral degrees under the guidance of Milton Babbitt.[1] She was a composition fellow at the Aspen Music Festival and School and the Tanglewood Music Center, where she held the ASCAP Leonard Bernstein Composer Fellowship in 2007.[2] She was a voice student of Adele Addison.[3]
From 2005 to 2006, she lived in Budapest and wrote on the new-music scene in Hungary for the journal The Musical Times.[4] She had previously organized an exchange program between the Juilliard School and the Liszt Academy.[5] The Hungarian-language weekly, Bécsi Napló (Vienna Journal) acknowledged her contribution to the visibility of Hungarian composers abroad.[6] She served as Composer in Residence for the National Youth Orchestra of Canada in 2010.[7]
Agócs was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2013.[8][9] In 2014 the American Academy of Arts and Letters named her as recipient of the Arts and Letters Award in Music.[10] She maintains a work studio in Flatrock, Newfoundland, Canada.
Agócs has one daughter, Olivia.[11]
Boston Modern Orchestra Project recorded and released the 2016 album The Debrecen Passion,[12] named one of the top 10 Classical albums of 2016 by the Boston Globe.[13] The title track of this album was nominated in 2017 by the Canadian Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences for a Juno Award, Classical Composition of the Year.[14][15]
In 2022, her Concerto for Violin and Percussion Orchestra was also nominated for Classical Composition of the Year.[16]
Agócs has written on American music for the journal Tempo[17] and also created a critical edition of the Symphony in A Major by Leopold Damrosch.[18]
