Program: Zoë Keating

Zoë Keating will perform pieces from her previous recordings and some works in progress, iterating and improvising each to suit the moment. No two performances are ever the same. 

Cellist and composer Zoë Keating has spent the last 20 years exploring the landscape of sounds a string instrument can make. She coaxes sounds out of the very edges of her cello, adeptly layering them into “swoon-inducing” (SF Weekly) music that is unclassifiable yet “a distinctive mix of old and new” (National Public Radio). With the use of computers and machines, she constructs her compositions in front of us, in real time, while we watch. Musical snippets are captured by the technology and added to each other, in layers, transforming simple, straightforward fragments of solo cello lines into giant orchestral forms. She is also known for her DIY approach—composing, recording, and producing her works on her own terms, without the help of a record label. 

Born in Canada, Keating started playing the cello when she was eight and went on to pursue electronic music and contemporary composition as part of her liberal arts studies at Sarah Lawrence College. After graduation she moved to San Francisco and built a career as an information architect and data analyst while moonlighting as a cellist in rock bands. Keating eventually combined her loves of music and technology, using a computer to live-layer her cello and performing for late-night parties in the San Francisco warehouse in which she lived. 

Keating’s recorded works have achieved a surprising degree of popular ubiquity for a DIY artist. Her self-produced albums have several times reached number one on the iTunes classical charts and have spent many months on the Billboard classical charts. Her recordings are used as bumper music for NPR’s Morning Edition, as the theme music to OnBeing, as the thinking music of the Sherlock Holmes character on CBS's Elementary, in countless documentaries, and in tens of thousands of online videos of everything from professional and amateur dance performances to rock climbing and gaming videos.