New Artist of the Month: Composer Kari Watson

Kari Watson claims to be tired, but you wouldn’t guess it, apart from the sheepish acknowledgment and an occasional yawn. In a conversation at a café on Chicago’s West Side, Watson confessed to being up late copying scores for one of four recent commissions, this one for the University of Chicago’s Grossman Ensemble. But the 26-year-old composer talks about that project, and all the rest, with inextinguishable excitement.

“I feel like I'm constantly surprised and delighted by sound,” Watson gushes. “My [musical] questions are iterating well, even if I feel like I'm hitting some duds sometimes.”

Probably only Watson considers them “duds.” Flush with commissions and nods from the Washington Post (“23 for ’23”), BMI (Student Composer Award), and the the prestigious Kranichstein Music Prize in 2023 (from Germany’s Darmstädter Ferienkurse), Watson has been working more or less at this breakneck pace, and across various mediums. They—Watson uses they/them pronouns—compose acoustic music, electronic music, and especially music that melds the two; music for large ensemble, chamber ensemble, and solo configurations; and music that runs the gamut from through-composed to improvised.

To state the obvious, Watson is busy—but not too busy to explore a new facet.  Since moving to Chicago, they have begun improvising on analog synthesizers. Watson now performs solo, as well as in a duo with cellist Katinka Kleijn.

“I can hear [an improvisatory] influence in their music,” says Kleijn, a member of the International Contemporary Ensemble and the Chicago Symphony. “There's an element of flow and naturalness that I think you have when you're also an active improviser.”

Another era

The Watson of 10 years ago, they insist, would never have seen all of this coming. Watson grew up outside Boston and studied voice—though, they “never felt comfortable as a performer” until recently. If someone in the family was going to compose, it probably would have been Watson’s twin sister, Jesi. Jesi was an accomplished pianist and turned her sibling onto early music, still an abiding love. (At one point during our conversation, Watson proudly flashed a tattoo of the medieval polymath Hildegard von Bingen on their forearm.)

“She was organized, really good at school…. She was grounded. She'd do something until it was done really well,” Watson says. “Meanwhile, I was kind of a mess and floating around. I wasn't detail-oriented. She would always tell me I was smart, but it was hard to feel smart with everything going on.”

“Everything” was Jesi’s cancer, which she fought for five years. Kari was often her main caretaker before she died at 16. While grieving, Watson lost interest in everything except music—the hobby the twins shared.

“It relates me to this person I love, who is also part of me. It's something that's given me a life on my own two feet, after that huge question mark of what life means anymore,” Watson says. “It’s hilarious to me that I'm now doing my Ph.D., because she was always the one that people expected to be the ‘smart twin.’ Now I’m living some hybrid life, like I've learned to fill in these characteristics that she had.”

After graduating with a B.M. from Oberlin, Watson matriculated at the University of Chicago in 2020; their research probes the intersection of electronically altered voices in music and gender performance. Since then, Watson has been seemingly omnipresent in the city’s contemporary classical and experimental scenes, whether that’s composing for ~Nois Saxophone Quartet, appearing on the heavy-hitting Frequency Festival, or having a piece commissioned and premiered by the Civic Orchestra of Chicago. Their first formal foray into music with modular synthesizers was as recently as 2023, with to like down in still waters of erasure [see video below]. Watson wrote the work for organ and spatialized electronics, including manipulated and AI voices.

Watson’s debut anthology album enclosures, released last month, is a sampling of works composed in 2022 and 2023, from solo pieces for harp and just-intonation vibraphone to a three-movement work recorded by the formidable French ensemble Quatuor Diotima. What with Watson’s creative growth spurt of late, enclosures already feels more archival than retrospective.

“What I'm doing now is like the happiest life I could have imagined for myself— in fact, happier than I could have imagined, because I believed that I would never be okay and be devastated forever,” Watson says. “No one saw this coming, including me.”