BRYAN CURT KOSTORS
Bryan Curt Kostors is a composer, conductor, performer, educator, and multimedia creator. He writes diverse and evocative music for orchestra, chamber groups, electronics, multimedia, dance, film, choir, and soloists, with the drastic and contrasting landscapes of the American West – desert, basin and range, high mountain peaks, ocean coast – playing a prominent role. A central element of Bryan’s work is the exploration of how place affects sound, visuals, and emotional interpretation, and how the history, landscape, or social aspects of a given geography can be used to create artwork that speaks to a wide and varied audience.
Bryan’s music has been performed internationally by ensembles such as the Lyris Quartet, the Mivos Quartet, the Wuhan Philharmonic, Hocket, and has received international awards for his scoring work in film and commercial visual media. He regularly collaborates with filmmaker Danny Corey on narrative and commercial projects that have been awarded at multiple festivals throughout the country. He has been a collaborator with choreographer Laurie Sefton since 2016 and their works together have been performed in Los Angeles, San Fransisco, and New York. Bryan recently released three full-length albums of electronic music titled the Basin and Range Trilogy. The upcoming release Between Systems, with pianist Thomas Kotcheff, is a reimagining of works by Morton Feldman and John Cage that employ orchestration, sound design, and reinterpretation through synthesizers and electronic instruments to boldly recontextualize the original solo piano scores.
Bryan writes and performs regularly in the world of electronic music, and his research work focuses on interdisciplinary, multimedia, and electroacoustic applications of electronic music performance, as well as scoring techniques for synthesis. Bryan is a member of Queenager, a synth-pop duo with singer Sarah Frazier; and also plays synthesizer in performance settings with Deaf Charlie, a rock duo formed by bassist Jeff Ament and drummer John Wicks.
He is currently the chair of composition and music theory at the University of Montana in Missoula, where he teaches music creation, pop & commercial music, and electronic music. His dog’s name is Rex.