Aidan Gold is a composer, conductor, and percussionist from Seattle, Washington. His music is widely varied, but focuses on musical characterization, narrative and storytelling, and performer agency / interaction. He is fascinated with the idea of music as a social act – a game or ritual that we perform to allow us to communicate and connect with one another, defining, challenging, and expanding our individual and collective identities.
Aidan is currently pursuing a DMA in Composition at the Juilliard School. He studies with Andrew Norman. Aidan has a Master of Music in Composition from the Thornton School of Music, as well as a Bachelor of Music in Composition and a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from the University of Washington. Aidan’s past composition teachers and mentors include Nina Young, Frank Ticheli, and Huck Hodge. He has written for a wide variety of ensembles including orchestra, wind ensemble, string quartet, percussion ensemble, fixed and interactive electronics, remote live ensemble, and many others. Aidan’s music has been played by the Seattle Symphony, the Juilliard Orchestra, the UW Wind Ensemble, the State Symphony Orchestra of Turkmenistan, the Student Symphony Orchestra of USC, the JACK Quartet, the Aizuri Quartet, the UCSB Ensemble for Contemporary Music, the UW Percussion/Modern Ensembles, the Talea Ensemble, the Inverted Space Ensemble, the Mivos Quartet, and others.
Some of Aidan’s pieces include: Ripple the Ocean of Eyes, a interactive orchestra piece in which the orchestra must react in real time to decisions made by the conductor and by each other; I’m Actually Just Making Stuff Up, a musical game about finding out who is improvising and who isn’t; Hard Weather, a song cycle about the melting glaciers and the effect of climate change on the ecosystems and characters dependent on the glaciers in collaboration with the poet Erin Lynch; Transmission Fog, a live remote performance project that examines communication and the struggle to understand each other across barriers; The Paradox of Stillness, a piece that explores stillness and repetition through a process-based accumulation of repeated patterns; For Whom do We “Perform”?, a piece for indeterminate instrumentation which features the musicians interacting with each other in many different ways, from playing a musical board game to trying to imitate each other’s lines in real time; and Parting Memory, a piece that explores the idea of musicians as actors portraying characters with distinct personalities that interact to tell a story.
Aidan is also interested in how music works with other interactive artistic mediums. He is one of over 50 composers around the world to write music for Celeste: Strawberry Jam, a community mod for the game Celeste. He composed three tracks that each interact with the gameplay in a different way, including synchronizing blocks with asymmetrical meters and polyrhythms.
Aidan is also a conductor, and is passionate about working closely with performers from many different backgrounds to explore and innovate methods of performance and connections between musicians. He was the assistant music director of the Student Symphony Orchestra of USC from 2020-2021, where he created and led a remote improvisatory ensemble that explored new methods of making music together live remotely. Aidan has also conducted the UW Percussion Ensemble and UW Modern Ensemble in concert. He has studied conducting with Larry Livingston, Julia Tai, and Timothy Salzman.
Aidan also enjoys performing as a percussionist. He studied percussion with Bonnie Whiting at the University of Washington. He has performed as a percussionist with the Student Symphony Orchestra of USC, Thornton Edge, UW Orchestra, the UW Wind Ensemble, the UW Percussion Ensemble, the UW Modern Ensemble, the Northwest Mahler Festival Orchestra, Seattle Metropolitan Chamber Orchestra, the Northwest Symphony Orchestra, and the Seattle Youth Symphony. Aidan also was the Percussion Coach for the young percussionists in the Bellevue Youth Symphony.
Aidan’s non-musical interests include Computer Science, Origami, and Orienteering. In his childhood he also was an avid mountain climber with his family, climbing Mt. Rainier in Washington when he was 7 years old, and visiting Everest Base Camp in a trip to the Himalayas when he was 8. Some of these trips serve as inspiration for his music, such as the piece Ladakhi Call, based on the landscape of Ladakh, an arid Himalayan region in North India where he and his family hiked during the summer of 2015.