Full Bio
Bobby Ge* (b. 1996) is an American-born, Shanghai-raised composer and media artist whose work engages with themes of communication, home, and hybridity. Described as “expressive and gripping” (Financial Times) and “exciting, frenzied, unpredictable” (CityNews CBR), his work is filled with shimmering textures and restless motion, often undergirded by a wry sense of humor.
Winner of the Barlow Prize, Ge has received a diverse array of commissions including a sinfonietta/percussion ensemble piece for the Albany Symphony’s Dogs of Desire, a saxophone concerto for the US Navy Band, a multimedia work for the icarus Quartet, and a song for soprano, ensemble, and electronics supported by New Music USA. The latter, premiered by Mind on Fire, received a 2024 ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Award.
The coming 2024-25 season sees several notable premieres, including a string quartet for the two-time GRAMMY winning Attacca Quartet, a mixed sextet commissioned by saxophonist Shivam Patel, a Pierrot quintet for Music from Copland House commissioned by their biannual Harvest Fund, and a large-scale symphonic work for the Albany Symphony. Ge will additionally serve as the Artist-in-Residence of the Telos Consort for the year, curating one full evening-length concert while closely advising the rest of their season programming. Other engagements include performances with the New England Philharmonic, Beth Morrison Projects, the New York Youth Symphony, the US Army Band, the Westside Chamber Players, Mycelium New Music, and the Aruna Quartet.
In previous years, Ge has received fellowships from the MATA Festival, the Bang on a Can Summer Festival, the Minnesota Orchestra Composer Institute, and Copland House’s CULTIVATE program. He was named the Composer of the Year by the Sioux City Symphony, the grand prize winner of the New York Youth Symphony’s Jon Deak First Music Award, and a winner of the Civic Orchestra of Chicago’s call for scores. Ge was the recipient of a Copland House Residency Award and has held additional residencies at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, Millay Arts, and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts.
Ge is an avid collaborator and has had the good fortune of sharing his work with a growing list of presenters that ranges from the unorthodox - the Space Telescope Science Institute, the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, NJ Audubon - to the cutting edge of new music, including Khemia Ensemble, Tesla Quartet, Blackbox Ensemble, JACK Quartet, and So Percussion.
A dedicated educator, Ge believes firmly in the value of the arts as an expressive and uniting force, and is eager to share this vision with others around him. He is currently pursuing his Ph.D at Princeton University as a Naumburg Fellow, and holds degrees from the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University (M.M.) and the University of California, Berkeley (B.A.). His primary teachers include Donnacha Dennehy, Nathalie Joachim, Juri Seo, Dan Trueman, Tyondai Braxton, Kevin Puts, Harold Meltzer, and Cindy Cox.
*A note on pronunciation: please read Ge as ‘Jee’ in performance contexts. For those who are curious, though, the original Chinese - 戈 - is pronounced ‘G-uh’ with a hard G.
Short Bio
Bobby Ge* is a Chinese-American composer and avid collaborator whose work, often collaborative in nature, focuses on themes of home, communication, and hybridity. Winner of the 2022 Barlow Prize, Ge has received commissions and performances by groups including the Minnesota Orchestra, the New York Youth Symphony, the Albany Symphony, the U.S. Navy Band, the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, the Harbin Symphony Orchestra, the Sioux City Symphony, Music from Copland House, the Bergamot, Tesla, and JACK Quartets, and Mind on Fire. He has created multimedia projects with the Space Telescope Science Institute, painters collective Art10Baltimore, the Cape May Bird Festival, and the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center. He is currently pursuing his Ph.D at Princeton University, and holds degrees from UCBerkeley and the Peabody Conservatory.
*A note on pronunciation: please read Ge as ‘Jee’ in performance contexts.
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