Katherine Young (musician)

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Katherine Young is an American bassoonist and composer who creates electro-acoustic and sonic-art music. She released the solo album Further Secret Origins in 2009 and, with her quartet, Pretty Monsters in 2012. She also recorded with composer Anthony Braxton on a 2008 album and played bassoon on Jessica Pavone’s 2024 album Clamor. In 2019 she was the featured composer for Basscon’s Wasteland festival, presenting a piece connected to Arthur Russell.

Young studied music and bassoon at Oberlin College and the Oberlin Conservatory, graduating in 2003. She earned an MA in Composition from Wesleyan University, where she studied with Anthony Braxton, and a DMA in Composition from the Bienen School of Music. Her doctoral dissertation is Nothing Is as It Appears: Anthony Braxton’s Trillium J. She has taught at Berklee College of Music and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and she is a professor of composition at Emory University. She has been based in Chicago and received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2021.