Gemma Peacocke | composer

Gemma Peacocke is a New Jersey-based composer from Aotearoa New Zealand. She writes avant-pop music for chamber ensembles, soloists, and orchestras, and she also writes a lot of music with electronics. She has a particular love of interdisciplinary collaborations and often works with visual artists, writers, dancers, theatre directors, and designers.

Gemma’s first album, Waves & Lines, sets to music poems by Afghan women collected and translated in I Am the Beggar of the World: Landays from contemporary Afghanistan by Pulitzer Prize-winner Eliza Griswold. Waves & Lines was released on New Amsterdam in 2019 and has been performed as an evening-length multimedia song cycle at the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C., Roulette Intermedium and National Sawdust in New York, and Australia’s Melbourne Recital Centre. 

Gemma is co-founder of the Kinds of Kings composer collective. Described by The New Yorker as “distinguished young creators who work in diverse styles,” the collective focuses on amplifying and advocating for under-heard voices in classical music. The collective was an Artist-in-Residence with National Sawdust in 2019-2020, and a new concerto commission, Nine Mothers, for the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra  and GRAMMY Award-winning ensemble Eighth Blackbird premiered in March 2022.

Gemma has been commissioned by the Auckland Philharmonia, Christchurch Symphony Orchestra, Rochester Philharmonic, Third Coast Percussion, PUBLIQuartet, Bang on a Can, Rubiks Collective, Stroma, and Alarm Will Sound.

A joint Ph.D. candidate in Music and Humanistic Studies at Princeton University, Gemma previously studied with Julia Wolfe at NYU Steinhardt and at the New Zealand School of Music. She lives in Princeton with her family and her biggest fan, a standard poodle called Mila. She also spends as much time as possible in New Zealand.

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